Senior Backend Engineer

About The Role

Are you passionate about Software Engineering and you want to have a big impact with your work? Do you believe in the power of ideas and want to grow and develop?

As Senior Backend Engineer you will contribute to our delivery performance and product success of our award winning Blinkist application. You will join the newly formed Personalisation team, a cross-functional team consisting of product management, engineering and data science. The team’s focus is building data products that leverage AI/ML technologies to deliver to our customers the right content, at the right time, in the right way!

Check out the interview process for this position here: https://jobs.blinkist.com/ima 🚀

What You Will Do

• Identify and proactively address challenges on the backend, driving complex technical decisions within your peer group.
• Take ownership of managing and extending our backend services. Use your technical expertise in building backend architecture and infrastructure at scale.
• Write high-quality and maintainable code: test, collaboratively review, and ship!
• Work on our Ruby on Rails stack, always keeping an eye on the latest trends, frameworks and/or programming languages.
• Follow and iterate on engineering best practices to achieve a robust code base, e.g. through code reviews and unit tests.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Design to build new features.
• Support other teams in finding pragmatic solutions that can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time.

What You Need To Have

• Strong object-oriented design skills gained from 5+ years of industry work with OOP languages
• Minimum 3 years of experience working with backend services, preferably with Ruby, Go, Java or JavaScript.
• In-depth experience in building and delivering robust, scalable platforms tackling performance and optimisation problems
• Experience in contributing to the design and architecture of existing and new systems with a strong orientation on reliability, design patterns and reliability
• Expertise with Rest APIs, modern database technologies at high scale and both testing and observability patterns
• Advanced understanding of different programming paradigms, clean code, high quality tests, security as well as performance related topics.
• Experience with data pipelines and information retrieval
• Experience working with Cloud Computing (such as AWS) and infrastructures
• Proficient in English and comfortable communicating even complex technical information. We work in a hybrid set-up, so clear communication is important for us.
• Interest in emerging AI/ML technologies is a plus

Why Blinkist

Our unique culture of empowerment, mutual respect, and transparency has always been our defining characteristic. We support each other and carve out opportunities for every individual to develop and grow. We strongly believe that diversity powers innovation, thus we celebrate and support our differences, providing equal opportunities for employment and career growth. We embrace a flexible, remote-friendly way of working that supports different needs and lifestyles.

🌟 We are proud to have been selected by LinkedIn as one of the Top 25 Startups in Germany. Glassdoor and Kununu ratings put us amongst Berlin’s top three employers.

These are some of our most valued benefits:

• 30 vacation days + local public holidays in your place of work
• Virtual stock options plan
• Quarterly days of learning and wellbeing
• An extra day off for you birthday
• Unlimited home-office with a monthly workspace allowance
• Learning & development budget
• Coaching budget for minorities and mothers returning from their leave
• Physical and mental health support through various partners
• Relocation and visa support for Germany

If you choose to join our team in Berlin, you'll have access to our modern office space in Neukölln and enjoy healthy plant-based meals prepared fresh every day by our very own chef. 🥑

Apply Now

If we’ve captured your interest and you want to take part in changing the world through the power of ideas – apply now and tell us what got you excited about this opportunity.

We look forward to hearing from you! ☀️

🔎 Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. If you think you have what it takes, even if you don't meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.

About Blinkist

We offer the best selection of non-fiction knowledge in bite-sized, digestible formats. Our catalogue gives access to key insights from 5,000+ nonfiction books, original podcasts and author-driven content across 27 categories. Blinkist exists to spark understanding.✨ We're helping people enrich their minds with powerful ideas, and turn ordinary moments into extraordinary learning opportunities—anytime, anywhere.