Staff Backend Engineer

Location: Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania; Portugal; Spain RemoFirst is transforming the way businesses hire and manage global teams. Our mission is to enable Freedom of Work by providing an all-in-one global HR platform that simplifies hiring, compliance, payroll, and benefits management. We partner with some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Fortune 500 businesses and leading startups. We are a small but strong team of 200+ people (and growing) hyper-focused on delivering a world-class platform and unparalleled service with our industry-leading partnerships. We are scaling at incredible speed and transforming one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. To fuel this momentum, we are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help us maintain and improve our existing Python-based systems and support the design, build, and strategic transition of parts of our backend to Java. This is a hands-on role with strong technical ownership and exposure to global-scale systems. This role goes beyond simply implementing requirements - you’d be a real product engineer taking extreme ownership over the quality of your product, caring deeply about our customers and what’s being built. You will collaborate with international engineering, product, and design teams in a fully remote setup. What hats will you wear: As a hands-on leader from the IC track you will design, develop, and maintain backend services using our core stack (Java/Python/SpringBoot/FastAPI/Postgres/Kafka) alongside the rest of the engineers on the squads As the lead engineer you will be working closely with the broader cross-functional team (Product, Design, Operations, Sales) to build reliable and delightful products that address the real pain points of businesses operating in the growing remote talent market. As an architect you will be in charge of making pragmatic yet sustainable architectural discussions, choose when and how to strangle functionalities off of our legacy monolith, establish domain boundaries, and choose the appropriate distributed system patterns As a leader in our Engineering Community of Practice, you will play a pivotal role in our adoption of modern engineering practices - TDD, real continuous delivery, SRE culture, API-first design to enable externally available dev APIs - and master the art of refactoring to gradually introduce them without stop-the-world year-long migrations As a mentor you will upskill less senior engineers by writing quality code yourself, leading our weekly learning sessions, conduct quality code reviews, encourage best practices by automatic trivial controls Requirements 8+ years of backend software development experience Strong professional experience with Python (Django, FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks) preferred Strong professional experience with Java, preferably using Spring Boot Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs preferred Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL); exposure to NoSQL databases is a plus Familiarity with unit testing, integration testing, and test-driven development (TDD) preferred Experience with CI/CD pipelines is required; experience with Git is preferred Deep understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems Experience working with cloud platforms; AWS is a plus Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English