About this role
Salary: £90,000 - 90,000 per year
Requirements
- Extensive professional backend development experience, ideally in enterprise, SaaS, or cloud-based product environments.
- Strong hands-on experience with Scala, including collections, Futures, immutability, pattern matching, error handling, and clean functional design.
- Commercial experience with Play Framework or comparable JVM backend frameworks; Pekko or Akka experience is highly relevant.
- Strong understanding of relational databases, especially MySQL, with practical knowledge of SQL optimization, indexes, query profiling, and transaction behaviour.
- Experience using Redis or similar technologies for caching, session handling, or performance-sensitive workloads.
- Deep understanding of OOP principles, functional programming, concurrency, the Scala type system, and advanced architectural patterns such as Tagless Final, type classes, and effect systems.
- Ability to design and evolve complex distributed systems while promoting engineering best practices across the team.
- Hands-on experience with AWS services and cloud-native delivery practices.
- Good understanding of CI/CD, Git, branching strategies, pull request flows, automated testing, and release practices.
- Ability to work effectively in distributed Agile teams, communicate clearly, and take ownership of complex technical problems.
- Experience with Squeryl, Doobie, or similar Scala data access libraries is nice to have.
- Familiarity with Grafana or Kibana dashboards, alerting, logging, and production observability practices is nice to have.
- Experience with large distributed systems, horizontal scaling, resilient service design, or high-throughput Play / Pekko applications is nice to have.
- Previous experience in Payroll, HR, HCM, ERP, compliance-heavy, or localisation-focused product domains is nice to have.
- Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish language skills would be beneficial, but are not essential.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain robust backend services using Scala 2.13 and Play Framework in a Pekko-based environment.
- Build clean, testable, and maintainable code using functional programming principles, immutability, pattern matching, and asynchronous programming with Futures.
- Work with MySQL to design efficient data access patterns, optimize queries, tune indexes, and profile database performance.
- Develop, deploy, and support services in AWS, working closely with DevOps and platform teams to ensure reliable delivery.
- Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, Git-based pull request workflows, code reviews, and engineering best practices.
- Collaborate with frontend engineers, QA, product owners, solution designers, and other backend developers to deliver high-quality product increments.
- Support production stability by investigating issues, improving observability, and continuously reducing technical debt.
- Take a pragmatic, delivery-focused approach and balance new feature development with maintenance, bug fixing, and technical improvement work.
- Proactively participate in code reviews, design discussions, troubleshooting, and knowledge sharing across the engineering team.
- Work with an established codebase while helping modernise it over time.
Technologies
- AWS
- Akka
- Backend
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- DevOps
- ERP
- Frontend
- Git
- Grafana
- Support
- JVM
- Kibana
- MySQL
- OOP
- Play Framework
- Redis
- SQL
- Sage
- Scala
More:
hackajob is partnering directly with Sage to hire a Senior Backend Developer for our HCM Localisation engineering team. We are working on a large-scale, cloud-based enterprise product and this role focuses on scalable backend services, complex product workflows, integrations, performance improvements, and ongoing platform modernisation. This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in our Newcastle office. We offer generous bonuses and pension scheme, with up to 8% matched pension contribution plus a 2% top-up by Sage, 25 days of paid annual leave with the option to buy up to 5 more days, 8 bank holiday days, paid volunteering time through our Sage Foundation, 50% income protection, holiday buy and sell, comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage, a work away scheme for up to 10 weeks a year, ongoing training and professional development, hybrid working, Healthy Mind app membership, and access to helpful memberships for finances, health, and wellbeing.
last updated 46 week of 2026