Staff Backend Engineer - JVM (Java/Kotlin) & AWS

Job description

Intro At Adsquare, our mission is driven by our core focus: Passion, solving complex challenges with great people, tech, and data; and Niche, location intelligence for programmatic advertisers. Our core values are integral to everything we do: Drive : We turn ambition into action. Resilience : We adapt, persevere, and grow stronger. No BS : We value honesty, transparency, and clear communication. Humble : We choose modesty over vanity and let results speak for themselves. Moral Compass : We do the right thing with fairness, integrity, and respect. We seek candidates who not only bring excellent technical expertise but also embody these values in every aspect of their work. Your Mission As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the design and operation of the high-throughput JVM services that turn massive streams of location data into products our partners depend on in real time. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy and engagement, seeking out the problems worth solving, driving performance and reliability across our services, and making the architectural decisions that shape how the whole organisation builds and scales. You will thrive in ambiguity, turn business-critical challenges into systems that hold up under real-world load, and lift the engineers around you as you go. Your Profile We are looking for a staff-level engineer with a strong backend and cloud background who is comfortable owning complex systems in production. Our stack is centered on Java, Kotlin, and AWS, and while the specifics are listed below, we don't expect prior experience with every tool we use. Must-Have Skills 8+ years building backend systems in production, with a track record of owning services end to end. Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across teams. Strong expertise in Java or another JVM language (Kotlin, Scala) and the Spring ecosystem. Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems under real-world load. Deep, hands-on AWS experience (for example S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, IAM), including designing cloud-native architectures. Hands-on experience with Docker and containerised deployment workflows. Practical experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (for example GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins). Fluency with AI-assisted development tools (for example Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code), using them to accele…