Senior Scala Backend Developer

Job Title

Senior Scala Backend Developer

Role Summary

As a Senior Scala Backend Developer you ll lead the design, development, and maintenance of robust, scalable backend systems and services using Scala. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, front-end, DevOps/SRE, QA) to build microservices, APIs and distributed systems, ensure high performance and reliability, and mentor junior or mid-level engineers. You will also influence architecture, best practices, and long-term technical strategy for backend services.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain scalable backend services and APIs using Scala.
• Architect and implement microservices-based or event-driven and distributed systems.
• Write clean, efficient, maintainable and testable code; follow best practices and design patterns.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and infrastructure/DevOps teams to deliver end-to-end features.
• Drive continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), containerisation, cloud-native deployments when applicable.
• Troubleshoot production issues, optimize performance and reliability of backend services.
• Conduct and participate in code reviews, mentoring and knowledge-sharing with junior developers.
• Participate in architectural decisions and technical planning for new features or system improvements.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Scala comfortable with functional programming paradigm, concurrency, and related Scala frameworks/tools.
• Several years of backend development experience (often 6 years) with proven track record building and operating backend systems.
• Solid understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems, RESTful (or GraphQL) APIs, and system design principles.
• Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL) and/or NoSQL databases.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS or similar), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), CI/CD, infrastructure as code depending on project stack.
• Strong testing discipline unit, integration tests, and using mocking frameworks as needed.
• Good communication skills, ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams, and mentoring capabilities.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Familiarity with Scala frameworks/libraries like Akka (Actors/Streams/HTTP), Play Framework, ZIO, or other functional programming and reactive libraries.
• Experience building event-driven or streaming services (e.g. using Kafka, RabbitMQ) or working with real-time data pipelines.
• Background in cloud-native architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), serverless or hybrid cloud setups.
• Previous experience mentoring or leading a team, driving architectural discussion, and owning crucial service components.