Lead Backend Engineer - Real-Time Distributed Systems

LeoVegas Group; Málaga; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work policy (2 days WFH)

4 weeks Workation

€ Wellness contribution

Health insurance

Life insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Short Fridays

Snacks and drinks

Team & office events

Job summary

LeoVegas Group is building a world-class Sportsbook platform and seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to lead distributed systems design and evolution. You will guide architectural decisions, ensure performance, reliability and scalability, and work closely with product teams in a fast-paced, real-time environment.

You will mentor engineers, improve CI/CD, observability and incident response while aligning technical work with business goals. English is the working language and collaboration is key.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and operating distributed systems at scale, owning complex backend systems end-to-end in production.
• Strong backend expertise in Java (21+ preferred), with a solid understanding of JVM internals, concurrency and multithreading.
• Hands-on experience with Reactive Programming and non-blocking systems using Spring Boot and/or Vert.x.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures; familiarity with Redis and other streaming/messaging technologies.
• Experience with Redis for caching and low-latency data access, and with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB).
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Grafana or Kibana, and with debugging complex production incidents.
• Strong system design and architectural decision-making, balancing latency, throughput, consistency and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and design discussions for scalable, resilient distributed systems.
• Drive simplification while maintaining performance and code quality.
• Identify risks before production and lead root cause analysis when incidents occur.
• Improve observability, monitoring and operational readiness; reduce technical debt.
• Promote best practices around event-driven architectures, performance, testing and CI/CD.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair programming and guidance.
• Partner with Product, Engineering Managers and Architects to translate business problems into practical solutions.
• Contribute to a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous improvement and engineering excellence.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Reactive programming

Spring Boot

Vert.x

Apache Kafka

Redis

SQL & NoSQL

Observability

System design

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Kibana

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Kubernetes

Job description

LeoVegas Group is building a world-class Sportsbook platform and seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to lead distributed systems design and evolution. You will guide architectural decisions, ensure performance, reliability and scalability, and work closely with product teams in a fast-paced, real-time environment.

You will mentor engineers, improve CI/CD, observability and incident response while aligning technical work with business goals. English is the working language and collaboration is key.