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Senior Backend Engineer - JVM (Java/Kotlin) & AWS

Berlin, External - PL
Full-time
Permanent employee

Intro

At Adsquare, our mission is driven by our core focus:
Passion – Solving complex challenges with great people, tech, and data.
Niche – Location Intelligence for Programmatic Advertisers.

Our core values are integral to everything we do:

  • Drive: We turn ambition into action.

  • Resilience: We adapt, persevere, and grow stronger.

  • No BS: We value honesty, transparency, and clear communication.

  • Humble: We choose modesty over vanity and let results speak for themselves.

  • Moral Compass: We do the right thing with fairness, integrity, and respect.

We seek candidates who not only bring top-tier technical expertise but also embody these values in every aspect of their work.

Your Mission

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Adsquare, you will take ownership of designing and operating high-scale distributed systems that power our core data products.

Your primary mission is to build reliable, high-throughput backend services on the JVM that process and serve large volumes of location intelligence data in real time.

You will work in a highly autonomous, cross-functional team and be expected to proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and drive them to production.



In this role, you will:

  • Design and evolve distributed backend systems with a strong focus on scalability, performance, and reliability

  • Own services end-to-end: from architecture decisions to production operations

  • Build and operate cloud-native systems on AWS

  • Collaborate closely with Product and Data teams to deliver impactful features

  • Continuously improve system design, engineering practices, and team effectiveness

Your Profile

We are looking for a senior-level engineer with a strong backend and cloud background, who is comfortable owning complex systems in production.


Must have:

  • 4–5+ years of experience building backend systems in production environments

  • Strong expertise in Java or other JVM-based languages (Kotlin, Scala) and the Spring ecosystem

  • Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems under real-world load

  • Hands-on experience with AWS, including designing cloud-native architectures

  • Strong understanding of concurrency, data consistency, and system reliability

  • Experience working with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-throughput environments

  • Ability to debug and optimize systems in production (performance, memory, latency)

  • A proactive approach: you identify problems, take ownership, and drive solutions without close supervision

Nice to have:

  • Have worked on systems processing large volumes of data or high request throughput

  • Understand trade-offs between different architectural approaches (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous processing)

  • Are comfortable making decisions in ambiguous situations

What you will do

  • Maintain and evolve existing partner integrations, ensuring reliability and scalability

  • Design and build new integrations to deliver large-scale data to our partners

  • Contribute to migrating and adapting services to a cloud-native architecture on AWS

  • Monitor system health, troubleshoot production issues, and improve overall system stability

Desired Background

We are particularly interested in candidates who have worked in environments involving:

  • Data-intensive systems or high-throughput backend services

  • Cloud-based architectures (especially AWS)

  • Partner integrations or API-driven systems

  • Systems evolving from monolithic to distributed or cloud-native architectures

Our Software Stack

Our backend stack is centered around the JVM ecosystem and AWS.

Core technologies:

  • Java (11+) and Kotlin

  • Spring / Spring Boot

  • AWS (e.g. S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda)

  • PostgreSQL

In our environment, you will also work with:

  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

  • NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB)

  • Container orchestration (Kubernetes)

  • Data processing tools (e.g. Athena, Glue, Batch, Step Functions)

We do not expect prior experience with all of the above, but you should be comfortable working with modern cloud infrastructure and data-intensive systems.

Your Opportunities

In this role, you will have a real influence on the technical direction of our systems.

We work with a high level of ownership - engineers are expected to make decisions, propose improvements, and drive changes from idea to production.

You will be able to:

  • Shape system architecture and influence key technical decisions

  • Take ownership of services and drive their evolution over time

  • Contribute to how we scale our systems and data processing capabilities

  • Work in an environment where initiative and accountability are valued

Locations

Remote

About us

Adsquare is the global audience & location intelligence company making marketing a whole lot smarter.

With eight offices around the world we are a truly international company but one united team working towards our vision: empowering companies to accelerate business growth by staying at the forefront of data-driven marketing. 

We are pioneers in advertising and data. We were born mobile, before it was a necessity, and have pioneered data-driven advertising in display and now DOOH. We have the smartest people, working with the best tech, so we can drive the pace of change.

We are visionaries. We see a better way for marketers and are doing everything we can to make that a reality. We believe in innovation and the power of technology. We believe in constantly improving what we’re doing because the work is never done.

We believe in what we do and rise to meet our own high standards. If there’s a problem, we fix it, humbly and without fuss or delay. Although our technology is best-of-breed, we are unassuming and modest in our approach.

We are passionately candid, both with each other and with our clients. We take the time to explain our approach to their problem, confident there is nothing to hide.

We are consistent and true to our word. We don’t take shortcuts but focus on being our clients’ most reliable partner. We make promises - and we keep them. As a result, clients enjoy spending time with us, because we are good people.