Senior Backend Engineer - Scala, AWS, Hybrid

Sage; Newcastle upon Tyne; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus & pension

Annual leave 25+5 days

Bank holidays 8

Volunteer days 5

Income protection 50%

Holiday buy/sell

Health coverage

Work away scheme

Training & development

Hybrid working

Healthy Mind app

Memberships

Job summary

Sage is seeking a Senior Backend Developer for its HCM Localisation team. The role focuses on building scalable backend services for a cloud-based enterprise product, with hybrid work requiring 3 days in the Newcastle office each week.

You will work with Scala 2.13, Play Framework, and Pekko in a cloud-first environment, collaborating across teams to modernise the platform and improve performance.

Qualifications

• Extensive backend experience in enterprise/SaaS/cloud environments.
• Strong Scala experience: collections, Futures, immutability, pattern matching, error handling.
• Commercial Play Framework or JVM backend experience; Pekko/Akka is a plus.
• Relational DB expertise with MySQL: optimization, indexes, profiling.
• Experience with Redis or similar caching architectures.
• Deep knowledge of OOP, FP, concurrency, and Scala type system.
• Experience designing distributed systems and promoting engineering best practices.
• Hands-on AWS and cloud-native delivery.
• CI/CD, Git, PRs, tests, and release processes.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services.
• Collaborate with frontend, QA, product owners, and other developers.
• Improve observability and reduce technical debt.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and code reviews.
• Deliver high-quality product increments in a hybrid, team-based environment.
• Support production stability and performance tuning.
• Work with distributed Agile teams and communicate clearly.

Skills

Scala

Play Framework

Akka/Pekko

MySQL

Redis

AWS

CI/CD

Git workflows

Distributed systems

Functional programming

OOP

APIs

Tools

Doobie

Grafana

Kibana

Job description

Sage is seeking a Senior Backend Developer for its HCM Localisation team. The role focuses on building scalable backend services for a cloud-based enterprise product, with hybrid work requiring 3 days in the Newcastle office each week.

You will work with Scala 2.13, Play Framework, and Pekko in a cloud-first environment, collaborating across teams to modernise the platform and improve performance.