Senior Backend Engineer - PHP & Golang (all genders)

Open communication is at the heart of our culture. Only by talking openly about challenges, big or small, can we find solutions together. Cardmarket connects people across continents, regardless of skin colour, origin, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. We treat everyone equally and expect the same from all applicants. Our strength lies in our diverse perspectives and the shared commitment to move forward together as an inclusive team. To strengthen our Technology Department, we're looking for a Senior Software Backend Engineer (PHP & Golang) to help build and evolve the systems that power Cardmarket. You'll be part of a small, autonomous team within our Engineering department, working on core backend services that keep the platform running smoothly every day. You'll work closely with other engineers to design new services in Go while gradually modernizing existing PHP systems. This role is for someone who enjoys solving complex problems, takes ownership of their code, and gets a kick out of building clean, reliable, and scalable software that improves a product used by millions every day.

Your Responsibilities

The Engineering department consists of 20+ engineers organized into specialized teams.

Each team operates as an autonomous scrum unit with clear ownership of their domain while collaborating across teams on shared infrastructure and platform components.

The Marketplace team consists of 4-5 engineers.

As part of the team you will:

• Design and implement new services in Go end-to-end
• Maintain and migrate existing PHP systems gradually

Do you have experience in Terraform?, * Fluent English is a must

• Available to start within 3 months
• Valid work permit for Germany is necessary & presence in Berlin is required!

3+ years backend experience with proficiency and willingness to work across both

• PHP (for system migration)
• Go (for new services), we expect a gradual shift toward Go as we modernize our stack

• Microservices and Event-driven architecture
• Building reliable, scalable, maintainable data intensive applications
• Strong systems thinking and problem-solving skills, able to break down complex problems while keeping user impact and long-term sustainability in mind
• Senior engineering mindset and hands-on experience and commitment to engineering excellence, including incident handling, root cause analysis, continuous improvement of observability and alerting, and delivering high-quality code with strong automated testing and best practices for maintainability and reliability, * Solid Scrum foundation
• Domain-driven design / DDD, E2E & Load testing experience
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, Gitlab, Terraform
• Certifications for AWS / Go / PHP
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including service-to-service communication and reliability best practices.
• Proficiency with observability stacks, including monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing (e.g., Grafana, NewRelic)., * Languages: Go 1.24 / PHP 8.3
• Databases: MySQL / Redis
• Infrastructure: AWS / VPC / Kubernetes / Terraform

Pulled from the full job description

• Flexible schedule

Your everyday work You will work in a full-time position (40 hours per week) at our office in Berlin, a place where creative energy, exchange, and focus come together. At the same time, we offer a hybrid working model and provide you with all the equipment you need for your work. Thanks to flexible working hours with clearly defined core hours, you can structure your day in a way that allows work and private life to harmonize well. * Community & Culture We meet each other as equals. An informal, first-name culture is a given, from interns to management. We believe that great results are achieved where people feel seen, heard, and valued. Our shared passion for trading card games connects us, at work and beyond. It symbolizes what defines us: curiosity, strategy, teamwork, and the drive to continuously challenge ourselves. * Vacation & further benefits Five weeks of paid vacation as well as a Germany-wide public transport ticket (Deutschlandticket) that supports you flexibly in your everyday life. A lunch allowance (up to €7.67 per workday) that allows you to be reimbursed for your lunch. * Your development matters Standing still is not an option for us, at least not in a positive sense. With a personal annual learning budget of €1,500, we deliberately invest in your development: conferences, courses, books, or new skills. You decide what helps you move forward. * Mental & physical health We know: Great performance can only happen when people are doing well. That's why we support you with an Urban Sports Club membership for your physical balance, our collaboration with DearEmployee, which offers anonymous, professional psychological support, and the Women of Cardmarket & LGBTQIA+ Group, which promotes exchange, visibility, and empowerment. In short With us, you won't find anonymous open-plan offices or rigid structures, but a work environment with heart, values, and genuine appreciation, a place where you're not only allowed to be yourself, but expected to be, take responsibility, and continue developing, professionally and especially personally.