Job Description

Sports Staff Backend Engineer_(Performance & Scalability)

In Sportsbook we work in a high-volume, real-time environment, integrating data feeds with our modern trading system and transactional betting platform (UI/Backend). Your contributions will cover maintaining/expanding our current Betting/Trading services acting as a hands-on technical consultant and mentor to other engineering teams, helping them solve their toughest performance and scalability challenges.

We are recruiting the best Staff Backend Engineer, Performance & Scalability for our

Sports Engineering Team!

ABOUT THE ROLEJoin our team as a Staff Software Engineer, Performance & Scalability position and play a crucial role in driving our organisation's growth through the development of outstanding products. You will be part of the SPORTS ARCHITECTURE & TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE group reporting directly to the Director of Sports Engineering and working closely with Principal Architects and Principal EngineersLeoVegas Group is building something special – a world-class team dedicated to creating the best Sportsbook platform in the market through cutting-edge technology and innovative gaming experiences.This is a dynamic team that will be working on creating new cool features and integrating them into LeoVegas platforms.We’re seeking a dynamic individual who can deliver state-of-the-art code while prioritising performance and scalability.As a key member of our team, you’ll collaborate effectively while also demonstrating initiative and a passion for sharing innovative ideas.YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

• Act as a hands-on technical consultant and mentor to other engineering teams, helping them solve their toughest performance and scalability challenges.
• Define and drive the adoption of a scalable performance testing strategy and tooling across the organization, enabling teams to own their performance.
• Work side by side with Principal Architects and Principal Engineers using state-of-the-art technology stack and deliver features in our microservice ecosystem
• As a Staff developer you will have a key role in owning delivery plans and aligning the product importance of reducing technical debt and prioritising platform initiatives.
• Identify obstacles to ensure quality and improve our user experience and how we build our products.
• Work with product managers, architects, QA engineers and other developers in a highly collaborative agile environment.
• Build for scale, availability, performance and security across the stack.

OUR SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE THE FOLLOWING:ESSENTIAL SKILLS

• 8+ years of software development experience with Java, Spring Boot and Event-Driven Architectures.
• Familiarity with Reactive Programming.
• Demonstrable, hands-on experience in performance analysis, profiling, and tuning of high-throughput, low-latency systems (e.g., garbage collection analysis, asynchronous patterns).
• Deep expertise in designing and implementing load testing strategies and familiarity with modern tooling.
• A strong understanding of observability principles and tooling for distributed systems (e.g., distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, advanced metrics with Prometheus)
• Proven ability to design, review, and enforce non-blocking end-to-end flows in reactive systems (event-loop discipline, worker isolation, backpressure, async drivers)
• Deep understanding of event-loop vs worker execution models, including failure modes (hidden blocking, context leaks, scheduler misuse)
• Hands-on experience debugging live performance incidents in distributed systems (CPU saturation, GC storms, tail latency explosions, noisy neighbors)
• Ability to form and validate performance hypotheses under incomplete data, using production-safe techniques
• Deep JVM knowledge: allocation profiling, escape analysis, JIT behavior, safepoints, memory layout trade-offs
• Experience tuning JVMs for low-latency and high-throughput workloads (heap sizing, region sizing, pause vs throughput trade-offs)
• Ability to design realistic load models (traffic shape, burstiness, fan-out, data skew) rather than synthetic steady-state tests
• Proven track record of making pragmatic trade-offs between performance, complexity, operability, and delivery pressure
• Trusted to say no to premature optimization — and yes when it actually matters
  

NICE TO HAVES

• Real experience with Vert.x would be a big plus.
• Strong understanding of networking and I/O performance: TCP behavior, connection pooling, TLS overhead, backpressure across service boundaries
• Experience tuning datastores and messaging systems for throughput and latency (indexes, batching, async clients, fan-out limits)
• Designs systems where observability is part of the API contract, not an afterthought (semantic metrics, meaningful spans, cardinality discipline)
• Ability to derive actionable signals from metrics, traces, and logs under high load (not just collect them)
• Online gaming and gambling experience

WHO WE ARE

At the core of LeoVegas Group is Team Leo. Our culture is our foundation and is what enables us to innovate, build, and lead as we trailblaze our way through the igaming industry. We’re a team of over 1800 innovators, initiators, and groundbreakers working in a fast-paced and agile environment across 16 offices worldwide.

BENEFITS
● Hybrid work policy
● 4 weeks of Workation (T&C apply)
● 25 vacation days
● 300 EUR wellness contribution annually
● Cobee - benefits app with flexible compensations and discounts
● Our office provides complimentary snacks and drinks; on Mondays, we serve breakfast.
● Team and office social events throughout the year.
JOIN US!
In our pride, we empower our teammates to find their roar and run with their wildest ideas. We don’t wait for things to happen; we pounce and make it happen!

Would you be a good fit for the Leo Pride - give us a roar!

**As our company working language is English, we’d like to see your CV in English, please**