Backend Engineer

Important Notice: While we don't currently have an immediate opening for a Backend Engineer in Portugal, we're proactively building a talent pipeline for future opportunities. If your profile aligns with what we're looking for, we'd love to consider you as new positions become available.

Your Mission

On our path to becoming the most visited online curated marketplace for special objects, our Engineering team is on a mission to deliver the best experience across our platforms by building best-in-class products for search and discovery, bidding, curation, logistics, payments, and support.

We’re a scale-up tackling customer-facing challenges at high scale, with 75,000 auctions per week and more than 10 million visitors per month. As a Backend Engineer, you’ll support one of our three verticals - Demand, Supply, or Fulfilment - improving and delivering product innovations for our platform.
Working in a small, fully autonomous, and highly collaborative Agile team, you will build scalable, maintainable, and resilient microservices and features. That’s why we’re looking for developers who share ideas, explore options, and communicate openly.

What You'll Do

You’ll be part of a team with end-to-end responsibility for its own microservices, collaborating across disciplines to build, operate, and continuously improve our products.

• Build end-to-end by designing, developing, testing, deploying, maintaining, and improving scalable microservices and features.
• Own what you deliver, taking responsibility for the quality, resilience, and maintainability of your team’s services throughout their lifecycle.
• Collaborate across disciplines while closely working with product designers, product owners, and frontend, backend, and mobile engineers to share ideas and deliver product innovations.
• Improve how we work, identifying opportunities to make our engineering processes more effective and efficient.
• Strengthen our engineering culture by documenting and advocating for development best practices across the team.
• Raise product quality by fixing bugs and refactoring the codebase where necessary to keep our products reliable and maintainable.
• Learn and experiment by testing new technologies and participating in Technical Week - a week dedicated to creativity, innovation, and knowledge sharing across domains after every two product sprints.

What You'll Bring

You understand the full lifecycle of web development, identify opportunities, explore solutions, and keep customer needs at the center of your work. Our stack is mainly focused on Ruby; however, prior Ruby experience is not essential if you’re passionate about learning new things.

• Strong software engineering foundations: 7+ years of software development experience, specifically with object-oriented programming.
• Relevant product experience: 3+ years of experience working with customer-facing products in industries such as e-commerce, fintech, or SaaS.
• Backend service expertise: Experience designing, implementing, and deploying backend services with a focus on high availability, low latency, and consistency.
• API and data knowledge: A good understanding of API design, SQL, and relational databases.
• Clear communication: Excellent English communication skills and comfort raising concerns, sharing ideas, and documenting your work.
• Collaborative mindset: You contribute to the team, take initiative, and step in to help when needed.
• Solution-oriented thinking: You actively identify opportunities and explore alternative approaches to solving problems.
• Commitment to growth: You take ownership of developing your skills by learning new technologies and seeking new opportunities.

How We Work

Our engineers work in small, fully autonomous, and highly collaborative Agile teams aligned with one of three verticals: Demand, Supply, or Fulfilment.

• Teams are responsible for their own microservices from design and development through deployment, maintenance, and improvement.
• Engineers collaborate closely with product designers, product owners, and frontend, backend, and mobile colleagues.
• We value bold thinking, curiosity, openness, initiative, and a strong customer focus.
• Technical Week creates dedicated space for experimentation, creativity, innovation, and knowledge sharing across domains.

Where You'll Be

This is a Hybrid role based in Lisbon. You will work from our Lisbon Hub a minimum of 2 days per week.
At this time, we are only considering candidates who are already based in Portugal. As a result, visa sponsorship and relocation support are not available for this position.

In Return

You’ll be part of an enthusiastic, highly motivated team of 800+ Catawikians.

• A competitive Annual Gross Base Salary depending on your level, competencies, and overall experience.
• Meal Allowance Card stipend per working day, in addition to salary.
• Health Insurance from day 1 (including dental coverage), with access to multiple hospitals and clinics and a vast wellness network.
• A Work From Home Allowance to help with your monthly household bills.
• Commuting between your home and our office is covered by Catawiki.
• Amazing Office right in the centre of Lisbon.