Weekend Backend Engineer
Sporty Group is looking for a Weekend Backend Engineer to join the Central Engineering team. This role focuses on building and improving the internal developer platform, with a specific emphasis on observability, load testing, system resiliency, and overall robustness.
The position combines platform engineering tasks with structured first-line operational responsibilities. The engineer will work within a regional shift pattern to provide 24/7 coverage, ensuring the stability and performance of distributed microservices that handle millions of daily requests.
- Improve observability across services (metrics, tracing, logging).
- Design and enhance load testing frameworks and resiliency tooling.
- Build reusable platform capabilities and internal libraries.
- Identify recurring operational pain points and eliminate them permanently.
- Contribute to standards that improve scalability and maintainability.
- Participate in architecture discussions and technical reviews.
- Participate in a defined regional shift pattern.
- Provide first-line incident response within your duty window.
- Triage alerts via Rootly and structured runbooks.
- Execute pre-approved mitigation steps.
- Escalate to product teams when required.
- Ensure clear documentation and handover between shifts.
- 3+ years experience in backend engineering (Java/Spring preferred) (required)
- Experience operating high-throughput production systems (required)
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes (required)
- Experience with observability tools and production diagnostics (required)
- Understanding of load testing and performance tuning (required)
- Strong SQL proficiency (required)
- Experience with containerised/cloud environments (Docker/K8s/AWS) (required)
- Ability to work autonomously and follow structured operational protocols (required)
- Clear written and verbal communication skills in English (required)
- Experience building shared internal tooling or platform libraries (preferred)
- Experience participating in on-call or incident response rotations (preferred)
Sporty Group is a sports technology company whose brands include SportyBet, a mobile-first sportsbook licensed in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda, alongside the Sporty.com app and the SportyTV broadcast service in Nigeria. SportyBet has sponsorship partnerships with Real Madrid and Manchester City. The group hires across Europe, Latin America and Asia, and many of its technology and product roles are remote.