Backend Software Engineer (Junior/Mid)

StartupHeroes is looking for a Junior/Mid Backend Engineer to develop features, design and implement API methods, and improve the performance and reliability of our systems as we rapidly support products and organizations. Our systems handle millions of requests daily, so robustness, scalability, and efficiency are at the heart of everything you'll build.

We build apps using reliable tools that our team knows and trusts: Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, AWS, and MySQL. Expertise in these areas is a huge plus, but flexibility and adaptability matter more to us - if you have experience with other languages (such as Python or Go) or databases, we'd still love to talk.

We're a collaborative team that genuinely enjoys working together with product managers, designers, frontend, iOS, Android, automation, and quality engineers. We value engineers who are solution-oriented, own their work, and can communicate their progress and decisions effectively to stakeholders. We also believe great engineers think not only about latency, fault tolerance, observability, and scalability, but also look through the eyes of the customer for every feature.

StartupHeroes has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture - we look for people who are curious, inventive, empathetic, and strive to be a little better every day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking, and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?

What you will be doing

• Brainstorm with Product Managers, Backend, and Frontend Engineers to conceptualize and build new features for our products.
• Actively own team features or systems and define their long-term health, while also improving the health of surrounding systems for operational excellence.
• Design and build systems with low latency, high availability, and resilience at scale.
• Assist our skilled support and operations teams in triaging and resolving production issues.
• Mentor other engineers, provide guidance, and conduct deep code reviews to help the team grow.
• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Work on challenging problems and build highly scalable distributed systems in a business-oriented way.
• Lead the creation and improvement of our real-time decision-making systems.

What you should have

• Strong expertise in data structures and algorithms.
• 2+ years of professional experience.
• Experience with Java (preferably Java 11+).
• Ability to contribute to technical architecture discussions and help drive technical decisions within your team.
• Write understandable, testable, and maintainable code.
• Excellent communication skills - you can explain complex technical concepts to engineers, stakeholders, and non-technical partners.
• A customer-first mindset when designing and implementing solutions.

What is nice to have

• Familiarity with Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Security, Maven, Kafka, AWS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Understanding of observability practices (metrics, monitoring, logging, alerting).
• Experience with caching strategies and technologies (e.g., Redis, Valkey) to improve system performance.
• Ability to contribute to frontend development when needed (TypeScript, React, etc.).