Software Engineer (Medior / Senior)

SmartCat, Novi Sad, Serbia (hybrid)

SmartCat is an AI-driven company that works on hard data problems. We're selective about the projects we take on, and we care that the work actually matters We're looking for a backend engineer, Medior or Senior, to help build and run large event-driven systems that have to stay reliable under heavy load. Most of the work is microservices that move a lot of data around.

Build and run microservices that handle large volumes of data.

Connect services with Kafka and Avro, and keep the schema contracts between them clean.

Work with different data storage (Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Postgress, Redis….) and handle schema changes without breaking things.

Keep services observable, and take the manual work out of testing and deployment.

As a Senior: own the architecture decisions and mentor the rest of the team.

3+ years for Medior, 5+ for Senior, mostly with Java and Spring Boot. Python or Go is a plus.

You've built distributed systems and are comfortable with microservices and event-driven design.

Hands-on with Kafka (Kafka Streams is a plus) and Avro with a schema registry.

Good with PostgreSQL and SQL. Experience with jOOQ, Flyway, or reactive access (R2DBC / Project Reactor) is a real plus.

You care whether things work in production: metrics, tracing and logging (we use OpenTelemetry, Micrometer and Prometheus), and fallback patterns like Resilience4j.

You know Docker and Kubernetes. We run on-prem and on OCI; cloud experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) is welcome too.

Security matters to you. Pen testing or red-team experience is a big plus.

You write tests, unit and integration (we use Testcontainers).

Clearly defined pay grades: from L1 (talented junior) to L10 (principal)

The career path that connects these grades, so you know where you're headed (at least here with us)

Loyalty coefficient: 10% on net compensation after 3 years at SmartCat, 20% after 5 years

Knowledge budget

Flexible hours and work from home

We're transparent, from L-levels to salaries, strategy and financials

Full support as you build up your expertise

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