Senior Backend Engineer

Playtomic; Madrid; Remote; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Playtomic is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build robust, scalable APIs and services. You will own your domain end-to-end, balancing technical excellence with business impact while collaborating with product, design, and frontend teams.

You will work in a fast-paced, pod-based environment, shipping production-ready software and integrating AI-assisted workflows to raise the bar on delivery and reliability. Strong English communication and a relevant degree are required.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Backend Engineer
• Experience with Spring Boot 3 & 4, Java 17/21, MongoDB, MySQL (Aurora), Kubernetes
• Extensive API design, development and maintenance
• Strong ownership, decisiveness, and delivery focus
• Product mindset with customer-first approach
• Familiarity with AI tools and agentic coding pipelines
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent
• Experience in product-led startups and scale-ups
• Production-ready software development with LLMs

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain APIs and services for frontend and third-party integrations
• Own domain end-to-end from design to production health
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product and frontend/mobile teams
• Ensure high performance and responsiveness of backend services
• Maintain code quality via reviews, profiling, and best practices
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate delivery and quality

Skills

Backend engineering

Spring Boot

Java 17/21

APIs

System design

Kubernetes

MongoDB

MySQL (Aurora)

AI tooling

English communication

Education

Degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Spring Boot 3 & 4

MongoDB

MySQL Aurora

Kubernetes

Java

Job description

Your mission As a Senior Backend Engineer at Playtomic, you will be responsible for developing robust and scalable solutions for our product, ensuring high performance, consistent and secure transactions. In Playtomic we operate in pods. A pod is a small, cross-functional team that owns a domain end-to-end: it takes a framed problem, makes the key product/technical decisions, and is responsible and accountable for building, delivering, and learning from the outcome in production. You operate as a pod owner: you take decisions, set technical direction in your domain, and pull in the right people when a problem crosses boundaries. Hands-on, but the senior bar is judgment — what to build, where the risk lives, and how to keep a distributed system healthy in production.

What you'll be doing

• Develop and maintain APIs and their services, enabling seamless communication between the frontend and backend, and facilitating third-party integrations to enhance the overall functionality of our product.
• Take end-to-end ownership of your domain: from technical design to delivery and production health, making autonomous decisions and driving initiatives with limited guidance.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, product designers and frontend/mobile engineers, bringing product thinking to devise solutions that balance technical excellence with business impact.
• Ensure high performance and responsiveness to requests from the frontend.
• Maintain a high code quality by continuously optimizing and improving our backend through code reviews, profiling, and implementing best practices and company's standards.
• Leverage AI tools and agentic coding pipelines in your day-to-day to ship faster and raise the bar on what you deliver.

Our Ideal "Player"

• Spain remote ideally: located in Madrid or able to commute to Madrid several times per month.
• Proven experience as a Backend Engineer. Familiarity with the whole web stack, including protocols, system architecture, database design, and web server optimization techniques. In particular, experience with Spring Boot 3 &4, Java 17 and 21, MongoDB, MySQL (Aurora), Kubernetes is preferred.
• Extensive experience in designing, developing, and maintaining APIs.
• High sense of ownership and accountability for outcomes, not just implementation. Comfortable making decisions and driving initiatives independently.
• Product mindset: sound product intuition and a customer-first approach, making technical decisions with clear impact on users and the business.
• Pragmatism and delivery focus, with comfort operating in ambiguity and a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proactive approach to identifying and addressing technical challenges.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, able to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Curiosity and adaptability: willing to step outside your immediate area of expertise and experience different aspects of product development.
• AI fluency: uses AI tools in day-to-day work and is familiar with the relevant tools and processes.
• Excellent spoken and written English is a must.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Extra points - Experience in product-led startups and scale-ups.
• Production-ready experience building software with LLMs and running agentic coding pipelines to develop functionality.
• Experience working with remote, partially remote, and multicultural teams.

Our hiring process

• 1st interview with People Team
• 2nd Tech assessment & Tech interview
• 3rd interview with Engineering Managers.
• 4rd interview with our Product team.

About PLAYTOMIC

We are world’s largest racket sports App for players and clubs. Our goal is to socialize sports practice: through the app, players can book courts, find other players with similar skill levels, and join a social community dedicated to playing. Since 2017, Playtomic has earned the trust of national and international investors, consolidating it as one of the main world players in sports digitalization. You will find +150 co-workers around the world with headquarters in Spain and offices in Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, UK, EEUU and Mexico.

Senior Backend Engineer • Madrid, Community of Madrid, ES