Software Engineer (Distributed Systems & Ownership) (w|m|d)

As a Senior Software Engineer in our Offer team at idealo , you will work on a highly distributed, production-critical system that powers idealo’s offer platform. Our systems process and serve offers at scale and directly impact the experience of millions of users comparing prices and making purchasing decisions.

You will join a team working with 50+ services across multiple domains , an event-driven architecture with technologies such as Kafka, and a cloud-native AWS environment . This is a role for someone who enjoys real system complexity, takes ownership beyond implementation, and wants to make production systems more reliable, scalable, and efficient over time.

At idealo, engineering teams take responsibility for the full lifecycle of their services: architecture, infrastructure, development, testing, security, deployment, monitoring, on-call, and maintenance. This follows the “you build it, you run it” mindset used in idealo’s engineering job descriptions.

About your new role

• You develop, operate, and continuously improve distributed backend services that are critical to idealo’s offer platform.

• You take end-to-end ownership of services in production — from technical design and implementation to monitoring, incident response, and long-term system quality.

• You work in an event-driven, cloud-native environment and contribute to the evolution of our architecture across multiple services and domains.

• You participate in a shared 24/7 on-call rotation , respond to incidents, debug production issues, and help make our systems more stable over time.

• You collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and other stakeholders, actively contributing technical input early and helping shape better solutions instead of simply executing tickets.

How we work

• We work in a continuous delivery model using Kanban instead of fixed sprints. Work flows continuously rather than through time-boxed iterations.

• Your day-to-day work will include a mix of feature development, operational topics, technical improvements, incident follow-ups, and automation. Priorities can shift, and we value engineers who can navigate several topics in parallel while staying focused on impact.

• We do not separate development from operations. Operating our systems is part of the role, and we continuously improve the way we build, run, and maintain software.

AI & automation

• AI is an important part of how we continue to evolve our engineering practices.

• You’ll use tools such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, or similar solutions to improve your workflow, while critically validating generated results. You’ll look for opportunities to automate repetitive tasks and are open to continuously improving how we build software as a team.

Skills & requirements

• You have solid experience in software engineering, ideally in backend development, distributed systems, or cloud-based environments.

• You bring a strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including APIs, testing, system design basics, reliability, and maintainability.

• You are interested in complex distributed systems and motivated to grow deeper into them over time.

• You are comfortable taking ownership of production systems, including operations, incident handling, and on-call responsibilities.

• You work in a self-driven way, actively look for better solutions, and do not wait for detailed instructions before taking responsibility.

• You enjoy learning, stepping into unknown areas, and sharing knowledge with others.

• You are able to work independently while also collaborating closely through pairing, code reviews, and open technical discussions.

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS or other cloud environments.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, for example Kafka.

• Experience with microservices, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, or automation.

• Experience improving reliability, performance, scalability, or cost efficiency in production systems.

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