Senior Backend Engineer (Core Team)
Playson is looking for a Senior Backend Developer who thrives in a deeply hands-on environment and enjoys being close to the code on a daily basis. This role is heavily focused on building, optimising, and scaling backend services in a high-load system where performance and reliability are critical.
The successful candidate will work on complex, real-time challenges at the core of the platform, improving latency, ensuring high availability, and making systems more efficient at scale. This is not a coordination-heavy role; it is for someone who enjoys writing production code, solving tough engineering problems, and seeing the direct impact of their work. Playson seeks a product-driven individual who takes ownership and prefers a build first, improve fast approach while working on systems where every millisecond matters.
- Work as part of a cross-functional team owning a core product within the platform.
- Design, build, and deliver new backend features end-to-end in a distributed environment.
- Write high-quality, production-level code daily, contributing directly to a high-load, scalable system.
- Take ownership of services handling financial transactions at scale, with a strong focus on reliability and accuracy.
- Proactively suggest and implement improvements in architecture, processes, and development practices.
- Participate in code and architectural reviews to maintain high engineering standards.
- Solve complex business and technical challenges with pragmatic, efficient solutions.
- Participate in on-call rotations within the squad to ensure the reliability and availability of systems.
- Play an active role in ongoing tech transformation initiatives across the platform.
- Collaborate closely with engineers, product, and other stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions used by millions globally.
- Solid experience with Node.js/TypeScript is ideal, but experts in other OOP languages such as Java, Python, C++, C#, or Go are welcome. (preferred)
- Strong understanding of asynchronous programming techniques. (required)
- Deep production experience with Kafka, including consumer-group rebalances, offset-commit strategies, and exactly-once semantics. (required)
- Experience designing idempotent, retry-safe handlers for at-least-once pipelines such as transactional outbox, idempotency keys, and deduplication. (required)
- Experience building services with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks. (required)
- Strong knowledge of relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. (required)
- Production experience with at least one NoSQL technology at scale, such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, or Redis. (required)
- Hands-on experience running services on Kubernetes and AWS/GCP, including deployment, autoscaling, resource limits, and production debugging. (required)
- Production operations experience, including on-call ownership of a high-load system, incident response, impact assessment, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements. (required)
- Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases. (nice-to-have)
- Experience with multi-region/failover architectures including data replication, regional isolation, and graceful degradation. (nice-to-have)
- Practical use of AI coding agents such as Cursor or Claude Code as part of daily development. (nice-to-have)
- Understanding of application security and industry best practices. (nice-to-have)
- Gambling domain experience. (nice-to-have)
- Competitive Salary
- Quarterly Bonuses
- Unlimited Paid Time Off
- Unlimited Paid Sick Leave
- Remote & Flexible Working
- Private Medical Insurance
- Financial Support for Life Events
- Professional Development Budget
- International Exposure
- Regular Company Events
Playson is a business-to-business developer of online slot games, established in 2012 and headquartered in Sliema, Malta. It supplies casino operators in more than 20 regulated markets, with game development, mathematics and art teams working across Europe.