Description review

Senior Backend Engineer (Core Team)

Playson · Europe, Ukraine · back to the listing

HR standards

72/100

solid

Title ↔ description

93/100

strong

Reads as

Backend Engineer

100% confident

What this role officially is

software developer — ESCO, the EU occupation classification

Software developers implement or program all kinds of software systems based on specifications and designs by using programming languages, tools, and platforms.

Also known as: application developer, application programmer, solutions developer, programmer, software specialist, application software developer

How others title the same work

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Startups

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  • Distributed Systems Engineer Beam
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  • Blaine, WA | CaseLight Systems Inc. (CSI) | Solo Founder | Remote (US Only) | Founding Systems Engineer | FULL EQUITY (30% Stake) Blaine, WA

What the listing never says

  • 33 bullet points. Long requirement lists deter qualified candidates, who read them as hard gates. Scope clarity
  • No pay range published. Candidates cannot tell whether applying is worth their time. Pay transparency

The listing, marked up

Nothing in the wording of this listing tripped a check. The scores above still judge how complete and coherent it is.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Developer who thrives in a deeply hands-on environment and enjoys being close to the code on a daily basis. This role is heavily focused on building, optimising, and scaling backend services in a high-load system where performance and reliability are critical.

You’ll be working on complex, real-time challenges at the core of our platform - improving latency, ensuring high availability, and making systems more efficient at scale. This is not a coordination-heavy role; it’s for someone who enjoys writing production code, solving tough engineering problems, and seeing the direct impact of their work.

If you’re product-driven, take ownership, and prefer a “build first, improve fast” approach while working on systems where every millisecond matters - this role will feel like home.

Key Responsibilities

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Work as part of a cross-functional team owning a core product within the platform

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Design, build, and deliver new backend features end-to-end in a distributed environment

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Write high-quality, production-level code daily, contributing directly to a high-load, scalable system

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Take ownership of services handling financial transactions at scale, with a strong focus on reliability and accuracy

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Proactively suggest and implement improvements in architecture, processes, and development practices

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Participate in code and architectural reviews to maintain high engineering standards

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Solve complex business and technical challenges with pragmatic, efficient solutions

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Participating in on-call rotations within the squad to ensure the reliability and availability of our systems

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Play an active role in ongoing tech transformation initiatives across the platform

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Collaborate closely with engineers, product, and other stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions used by millions globally

Requirements

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Solid experience with Node.js/TypeScript is ideal, but we also welcome experts in other OOP languages such as Java, Python, C++, C#, or Go

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Strong understanding of asynchronous programming techniques

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Deep production experience with Kafka: confident reasoning about consumer-group rebalances and their impact on in-flight processing, offset-commit strategies under retries and duplicate delivery, and the limits of "exactly-once" semantics

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Experience designing idempotent, retry-safe handlers for at-least-once pipelines: transactional outbox, idempotency keys, and deduplication

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Experience building services with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks

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Strong knowledge of relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, plus production experience with at least one NoSQL technology at scale, such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, or Redis

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Hands-on experience running services on Kubernetes and AWS/GCP: deployment, autoscaling, resource limits, and production debugging

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Production operations experience: on-call ownership of a high-load system, including incident response, impact assessment, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements

Nice to Have

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Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases

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Experience with multi-region / failover architectures: data replication, regional isolation, and graceful degradation

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Practical use of AI coding agents such as Cursor or Claude Code as part of daily development: effective prompting, reviewing, and validating AI-generated code

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Understanding of application security and industry best practices

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Gambling domain experience

What We Offer

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Competitive Salary

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Quarterly Bonuses

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Unlimited Paid Time Off

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Unlimited Paid Sick Leave

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Remote & Flexible Working

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Private Medical Insurance

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Financial Support for Life Events

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Professional Development Budget

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International Exposure

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Regular Company Events

*Benefits may vary depending on location and contractual agreement

Recruitment process

1. HR interview (30-45mins)

2. Interview with a Hiring Manager (45mins)

3. Technical interview with live coding (90mins)

4. Final Interview with C-level (60 mins)

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How this was produced

Highlights are found by rule, not by a model: each one is a phrase matched at a known position, and every note is a template we wrote. The two scores come from a typed-decision model (Jev) that reads the listing against the official role definition and real listings for the same role, and returns probabilities rather than prose — it never writes any of the words on this page, and never chooses what to highlight.

Deterministic penalty applied to the HR score: 8 points (from 80 before penalties). Reviewed 21 Sep 2026.