Senior Backend Engineer, Platform (f/m/d)
Job description
Backend engineer joining Apaleo's small Platform team as an individual contributor, owning infrastructure, developer experience and security foundations. The role is a high-ownership seat driving ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives end to end with the Platform Lead.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Germany
- Languages
- English – fluent
What you'll do
- Designing and building scalable, reliable and maintainable backend systems.
- Spotting and scoping problems and initiatives yourself, not just picking up assigned tickets: weighing impact, priority and timing.
- Contributing to architectural decisions and design discussions, and bringing other teams along.
- Driving substantial, cross-cutting initiatives end to end, coordinating with stakeholders across engineering.
- Building and maintaining internal tools and infrastructure (AWS, Terraform) that help teams deliver faster and more reliably.
- Owning observability, logging and operational excellence to keep the platform highly available.
- Sharing knowledge through code reviews, design reviews and pairing, and helping raise technical standards.
- Spotting where AI and automation can improve how we build and run software.
What we're looking for
- 5+ years of backend development experience, with a track record of owning significant technical work from ambiguity through to completion.
- Substantial hands-on ownership of infrastructure, reliability or performance, ideally on a platform or infrastructure team rather than a pure product team.
- Strong engineering fundamentals that transfer across languages and cloud platforms.
- Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred; strong Azure fundamentals and genuine enthusiasm for the switch work just as well).
- Comfort with containerised services and infrastructure-as-code (Docker, Terraform; CloudFormation exposure is relevant given our current stack).
- Confidence writing your own unit and integration tests, as we don't have a dedicated QA function.
- A project you can talk about in depth: the problem, what you did and the impact it had.
- Fluent English.
Nice to have
- Direct experience with C# (.NET), PostgreSQL, AWS and ECS or Kubernetes.
- Experience setting up infrastructure-as-code from scratch and working with it day to day, ideally with Terraform, including migrating or consolidating from other approaches (like CloudFormation).
- Experience with Kafka or other event-driven and streaming systems (Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ or SQS are good transferable equivalents).
- Experience owning observability and logging for highly available systems.
- Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor AI, ChatGPT, Amazon CodeWhisperer) and a genuine interest in AI-driven engineering improvement.
- Experience mentoring other engineers, and introducing new technology, like AI tooling, to other teams.
Your team
Platform
Platform owns infrastructure, developer experience and security foundations for the whole engineering organisation. It's a small team, with no dedicated DevOps or QA function to hand work to.
Benefits
- An International Team: Work alongside colleagues from over 20 nationalities.
- Growth and Development: 360° feedback reviews, an evolving career framework and an annual learning budget of €1,000+.
- Autonomy and Ownership: Great ideas can come from anywhere. We trust you to make decisions and contribute directly.
- Real Impact: Join a fast-growing scale-up transforming hospitality. From day one, your work drives real impact.
- Fair Pay: Competitive salaries guided by benchmarking data, with recognition for performance and contribution.
- Flexible Work: Work from home, the office or a hybrid mix. We focus on results, not clocking hours.
- Time Off and Wellbeing: 30 days of vacation and an EGYM Wellpass membership.
- Free Public Transport: A fully covered Deutschland Ticket for travel across Germany.
- Team Connection: Regular team dinners, company meetups and offsite events.
Apply
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About Apaleo
The world's most open, API-first property management platform
Apaleo is an API-first property management platform for hospitality. Its modular, AI-powered infrastructure lets hoteliers customise their tech stack, automate routine work and deliver personalised guest experiences, powered by best-in-class apps and autonomous AI agents that adapt to every stay.
Mission
Powering the next generation of hospitality operations with modular, AI-powered infrastructure that lets hoteliers customise their tech stack, automate routine work and deliver seamless, personalised guest experiences.
Key facts
- Hospitality technology
- Colleagues from over 20 nationalities
- Fast-growing scale-up transforming hospitality
- Annual learning budget of €1,000+
- 30 days of vacation
- EGYM Wellpass membership
- Fully covered Deutschland Ticket
What they value
- Autonomy and Ownership
- Real Impact
- Great ideas can come from anywhere