Backend Engineer

Join an international engineering team building a high-performance data platform used by Fortune 500 companies. As a Middle Java Engineer, you’ll work with distributed, multithreaded systems, solve real-world production challenges, and deepen your expertise with mentorship from senior engineers. Fully remote across Europe, with long-term collaboration and the opportunity to grow in the data engineering domain.

About Our Client
Our client is a leading enterprise data platform company building an open, high-performance data lakehouse for AI and analytical workloads. The platform combines an intelligent SQL query engine, an AI-ready semantic layer, and an open catalog built on Apache Iceberg — enabling Fortune 500 companies across finance, energy, manufacturing, and logistics to unify, query, and govern data at massive scale across cloud and on-premise sources.
 

About the Role
We are looking for a Middle Software Engineer (1.5–3.5 years of experience) to join the sustaining engineering team for the data catalog and enterprise data management layer of a large-scale lakehouse platform — the services that automate data ingestion and optimize Apache Iceberg tables for existing customers. The team's mandate is to keep these services running reliably for current clients: investigating and fixing customer-reported issues, resolving defects, addressing performance regressions, and keeping dependencies and security patches current. This is a maintenance and support role, not a feature-development role.
 

This is a backend Java role in a multithreaded, distributed environment where stability and availability for production customers are the baseline expectations. You will work with hands-on mentorship from senior engineers and in daily collaboration with US-based engineering leads and support teams.

Responsibilities
 

• Investigate, reproduce, and fix customer-reported issues and defects in the catalog and data-management services (Java)
• Diagnose production problems from logs, metrics, and thread or heap dumps, and work with support teams and solution architects on customer escalations
• Address performance regressions and stability issues in multithreaded, distributed services.
• Keep the services current: dependency and library upgrades, security patches, and compatibility fixes
• Write regression tests and small supportability improvements (logging, metrics, diagnostics) so issues are easier to catch and triage next time
• Take part in code reviews and follow the team's release and hotfix process
• Track and apply relevant upstream fixes from the Apache Foundation open-source projects used by the platform

• Communicate status, root causes, and blockers clearly in daily syncs with US-based engineering leads

   

Required Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field 
• 1.5–3.5 years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in backend or data-intensive systems
• Strong Java programming skills: solid command of the language, the JVM ecosystem, and standard tooling (Maven or Gradle, JUnit)
• Comfortable debugging and supporting production systems — reading logs and stack traces, reproducing issues, and finding root causes
• Good grounding in data structures and algorithms
• Working knowledge of multithreaded and asynchronous programming in Java (java.util.concurrent, executors, futures) and the motivation to go deeper
• Care for engineering quality — tests, code reviews, and an understanding of why availability, resiliency, and zero-downtime upgrades matter 
• Comfort with a fast-moving environment, ownership of your work, and an eagerness to learn from and be mentored by senior teammates
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development workflows — using modern AI tools productively while critically validating their output
• English Upper-Intermediate or higher (B2+) — daily written and verbal communication with a US-based engineering team

• Availability to work EU business hours shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with US West Coast mornings
   

  Desired Skills

• C++ experience — reading or writing performance-sensitive native code
• Exposure to database internals or query planning
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts: concurrency control, data replication, storage systems 
• Middle Software Engineer – Catalog, EDM
• Apache Iceberg or other open table formats (Delta Lake, Hudi)

• Messaging systems: Kafka, NATS, or cloud pub/sub servicesи Contributions to open-source projects (Apache projects especially valued)
   

  Details

• Engagement: Long-term contract
• Location: Europe (EU / EEA / UK), remote
• Working hours: EU business hours, shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with the US West Coast team