Staff Backend Engineer - Platform (f/m/d)
Job description
Staff Backend Engineer on Apaleo's Platform team, owning large, ambiguous, cross-cutting infrastructure and backend initiatives end to end. The role focuses on scalability, developer experience and security foundations for the whole engineering org.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Munich, Germany
- Languages
- English – fluent
What you'll do
- Architecting and developing scalable, reliable and maintainable backend systems
- Self-identifying and scoping problems and initiatives, assessing impact, prioritisation and timing independently
- Leading architectural decisions and design discussions with cross-team alignment
- Driving large, ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives end to end, including coordination with multiple stakeholders
- Mentoring engineers and driving technical excellence
- Building and maintaining internal tools and infrastructure (AWS, Terraform) that empower teams to deliver faster and more reliably
- Owning observability, logging and operational excellence to keep the platform highly available
- Participating in on-call rotations and stepping in as a reliable problem solver during incidents
- Proactively spotting where AI and automation can drive technical improvement
- Solving horizontal write-scaling for the database
- Modernising the CI/CD pipeline for faster, more reliable delivery
- Migrating infrastructure-as-code fully from CloudFormation to Terraform, including the ability to recreate an Apaleo environment from scratch
- Extracting and reworking common services (like shared schedulers) to get ready for the next scale level
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of backend development experience, including several years in a staff-level or technical leadership role
- Strong engineering fundamentals that transfer across languages and cloud platforms
- A track record of owning large technical initiatives from ambiguity through to completion, ideally on a platform or infrastructure team rather than a pure product team
- Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred; strong Azure fundamentals with genuine enthusiasm for the switch work just as well)
- Comfortable working 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: we don't have a dedicated QA function
- Fluent English
Nice to have
- Direct experience with C# (.NET), PostgreSQL, AWS and ECS/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 IaC approaches (like CloudFormation)
- Experience with Kafka or other event-driven and streaming systems (Azure Service Bus experience is a good transferable equivalent)
- Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor AI, ChatGPT, Amazon CodeWhisperer) and a genuine interest in AI-driven engineering improvement
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, particularly for introducing new technology, like AI tooling, to other teams
Your team
Platform
Platform owns infrastructure, developer experience and security foundations for the whole engineering org.
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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, offering modular, AI-powered infrastructure with 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
- Diverse and international team with over 20 nationalities
- Fast-growing scale-up
- 360° feedback reviews, a dedicated learning budget and an evolving career framework
- 30 days of paid holiday
- Fully covered Deutschland Ticket for free public transport across Germany
- EGYM Wellpass membership
What they value
- Autonomy and ownership
- Trust and transparency