Distributed System / Backend Engineer (Reading,...

We are seeking a highly skilled Distributed Systems / Backend Engineer to join our team and build, scale, and optimize high-throughput backend systems. This role will focus on designing and supporting event-driven architectures, with a strong emphasis on Java, Spring Boot, and Kafka-based messaging systems.

This is a hands-on engineering role where you will contribute to core backend services, support production systems, and partner closely with frontend and DevOps teams to ensure system reliability and performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain distributed systems that support high-scale, real-time applications

• Develop and optimize event-driven architectures using Kafka and messaging frameworks

• Write clean, production-grade code using Java and Spring Boot

• Collaborate with frontend engineers to deliver reliable backend APIs and services

• Build and maintain high-throughput data pipelines and messaging systems

• Conduct code reviews, troubleshoot issues, and contribute to overall system design

• Partner with DevOps teams on deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence

Implement tooling and processes to improve system observability, reliability, and scalability

Strong experience in distributed systems with strong fundamentals

• Kafka deep expertise: Partitioning, replication, consumer groups, offset management, Schema Registry

• High-throughput messaging architecture: Event-driven patterns, exactly-once vs. at-least-once semantics, backpressure handling

• Strong Java platform skills: Concurrency, JVM tuning, Kafka client APIs (Producer/Consumer/Streams)

• Performance optimization & Cost management: Profiling, load testing, infrastructure right-sizing, etc,

• Hands-on engineering: Writes production code, conducts reviews, builds operational tooling

• Team support and ops ownership working with DevOps