Senior Backend Engineer (Java)

Senior Back-end Engineer – Operations & Customer Service

About the Role (title, high level expectations/impact, reporting into, department):

As Scentbird continues to grow, so does the need to scale our operations and customer service infrastructure. To support this growth, we’re expanding our small but essential back-office engineering team—a group focused on building and maintaining internal tools and back-end services that directly impact operational efficiency and customer lifetime value.

We’re looking for a Senior Back-end Engineer to join this team and lead critical initiatives across subscription management, order fulfillment, warehouse integration, and customer support tooling. This role will focus heavily on designing scalable back-end services and APIs that integrate with internal systems and external platforms to drive automation, accuracy, and speed across operational workflows.

What You’ll Be Responsible For:

• Design, build, and maintain back-end services that support order processing, subscription billing, customer service tools, and warehouse logistics.

• Develop scalable, well-documented APIs that integrate with internal dashboards and third-party systems.

• Collaborate with your product manager to break down requirements and shape implementation plans.

• Continuously improve reliability and data flow across systems through better integration and architecture.

• Contribute to internal standards for code quality, maintainability, and performance through code reviews and mentorship.

• Identify and address technical debt and performance bottlenecks.

• Confidently own features from proposal through development, testing, deployment, and monitoring.

What You’ll Need to Have:

• 7+ years of professional back-end engineering experience, ideally in high-scale, production environments.

• Strong Java expertise, with demonstrated familiarity with recent Java releases and a preference for using modern language/runtime features.

• Deep understanding of service communication patterns and protocols, especially GraphQL and gRPC—including when/why GraphQL is preferable to REST, and the purpose, performance characteristics, and tradeoffs of gRPC.

• Strong experience designing and building scalable APIs and backend services in distributed systems.

• Solid knowledge of relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL (schema design, indexing, query optimization, transactional behavior).

• Strong cloud experience, preferably AWS, including real-world use of managed services and production-grade deployments.

• Nice to have / plus: practical familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized environments, with the expectation that you understand Kubernetes first as a user/operator (deploying, debugging, observing services) rather than only theory.

• Experience with Micronaut (preferred) or Quarkus, or a clear understanding of how Micronaut/Quarkus differ from Spring Boot and why those differences matter in production (startup time, memory footprint, AOT/DI approach, etc.).

• Nice to have: Redis experience (caching, queues, rate limiting, etc.).

• Plus: experience with telemetry and observability standards such as OpenTelemetry.
  

What We’ll Love About You:

• You clearly and concisely communicate technical, architectural, and organizational problems and propose iterative, practical solutions.

• You keep stakeholders aligned through consistent, effective communication and regular status updates.

• You’re self-motivated, organized, and able to work independently and cross-functionally in a fully remote setup.

• You take initiative, give and receive feedback well, and are comfortable mentoring others.

• You bring a solution-oriented mindset and a collaborative, low-ego approach to teamwork.

• You care about code quality, maintainability, and helping your team continuously improve.

• Proficiency in written and spoken English, suitable for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.

What You’ll Love About Us:

• Competitive base compensation.

• Bonus program.

• Paid Time Off and Work From Home.

• A fun, creative and energetic work environment.