Senior Backend Engineer - Kotlin

As a senior backend engineer, you will be responsible for developing, owning and maintaining microservices for our auction platform. In this role, you will build, optimize, and maintain critical backend services that supports our online auctioning platform. Through a blend of strategic problem-solving and hands-on coding, you'll contribute to positioning TBAuctions and its brands as leaders in the online auction industry.

You'll work closely with cross-functional teams across multiple locations, contributing to platform-wide technical decisions while growing your expertise in functional programming with Kotlin, cloud-native development and distributed systems.

What You Will Do

Development & Delivery

• Architect, develop, and maintain Kotlin-based microservices handling inventory management, auction listings, bids, payments and financial operations
• Write clean, testable code following functional programming principles
• Convert business requirements into high quality functionality in the platform
• Work with Azure SQL, Redis and CosmosDB databases, optimising queries and data models for performance and reliability
• Contribute to event-driven architectures that power our real-time auction platform

Cloud & DevOps

• Build and deploy services within our Azure cloud-native infrastructure
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and Argo
• Implement observability and monitoring solutions to ensure system health and performance, using Prometheus, Loki & Grafana
• Work with containerised applications and Kubernetes deployments, using AKS

Collaboration & Growth

• Collaborate with local and international teams to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions
• Participate in architectural discussions and contribute to platform-level patterns
• Partner with the product managers, designers, senior engineers and architects to turn business needs into technical solutions
• Share knowledge and support continuous improvement within the team

Do you have experience in Terraform?, * Strong JVM proficiency with Kotlin with minimum 6 years in server-side development

• Experience with microservices, and event-driven architectures
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architecture principles, with hands-on Azure experience preferred
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and tooling (Azure DevOps preferred)
• Experience with relational databases (Azure SQL)
• Interest to work in functional programming paradigms (Arrow)
• Exposure to containers, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts (Terraform)
• Experience with performance analysis and tuning, from databases to network calls & resource management
• An understanding of cost management of resources in a cloud environment
• Solid understanding of security principles and data privacy
• Solid understanding of architecture patterns in a distributed system

Mindset & Soft Skills

• A self-starter who doesn't wait to be told what to do, you spot opportunities and act on them
• A genuine team player who believes the best work happens together
• A pragmatic, outcome-driven approach to problem-solving
• Naturally curious with a growth mindset, you're always looking to learn something new
• Generous with your knowledge and ready to help colleagues succeed
• Pragmatic and able to make tradeoffs in a complex situation
• Thinks ahead, having a 2 week, 2 month and 1 year view of the future

Nice to Have

• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience with non-relational databases (Redis, CosmosDB)
• Experience working as part of an agile team (Scrum)
• Experience with Arrow or similar functional frameworks or functional languages (e.g Scala)
• Understanding of distributed systems patterns and challenges
• Exposure to Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)
• Experience mentoring other developers
• Advanced security principles skills
• Advanced performance testing and optimisation skills

• Competitive salary of € 85.000 - 90.000 per year
• Good pension scheme
• Bonus scheme (up to 1 gross monthly salary per year)
• 25 vacation days
• Laptop and iPhone
• Training opportunities
• Hybrid flexible work options
• A professional team where hard work is combined with humor