Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

About the opportunity

At N26, security is the foundation of our bank. As one of the first banks completely hosted in the cloud, our security, resilience, and productivity standards require not only the use of a modern technology stack but also the building of teams aligned with our principles and in service of our product teams, the company, and our customers. We are seeking a talented Senior Backend Engineer with a strong security or SRE background to join our Security Engineering team. In this role, you will be part of a small, high-impact, and independent team responsible for building and scaling the N26 Security Platform. This team acts as a central force within our security organization, building internal products and automation engines that support multiple specialized teams across the company. Our cross-functional teams are passionate about collaboration and sharing knowledge, as well as working with a high degree of autonomy. This is a role for an engineer who thrives on autonomy, wants to embrace the latest technological updates, and is excited to solve high-stakes technical challenges on a daily basis.

Once here you will

Design and Own End-to-End Solutions: Lead the architectural design and implementation of high-availability, high-performance backend services and platform components, seeing them through from concept to production completion.

Build the Security Platform: Develop tools and automation engines that enable specialized security teams to automate threat detection, incident response, and vulnerability management at scale.

Enable the Organization: Act as a technical partner to various streams within the organization, building the shared infrastructure and automation they need to operate efficiently.

Drive Technical Excellence: Maintain an exceptionally high bar for code quality, software architectures including Distributed systems and Domain-Driven Design, automated testing, and system reliability right across the platform.

Champion "You Build It, You Run It": Own the full lifecycle of your services, leveraging modern CI/CD practices and Infrastructure as Code to ensure seamless, resilient cloud production deployments.

What you bring

Strong Backend Foundation: 5+ years of experience building production-grade software applications and managing complex backend architectures in large-scale production systems.

Architecture & Best Practices: Solid experience with software development best practices and modern architectures including Distributed systems and Domain-Driven Design, as well as testing frameworks.

Cloud & Infrastructure Mastery: Previous experience with cloud architectures, preferably with AWS, alongside containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Quality Craftsmanship: A strict commitment to clean code, comprehensive testing strategies, system scalability, and building services that are as secure as they are performant.

Language Proficiency: Full professional proficiency in English with excellent communication and documentation skills.

Nice to have

Security or SRE Background: A strong background or proven experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or security automation, for example integrating SAST/DAST, SIEM, SOAR, or building automated patching/remediation frameworks.

Event Streaming: Hands-on experience developing and/or operating event streaming platforms, preferably Apache Kafka.

Infrastructure as Code: Deep knowledge of IaC methodologies and tools, particularly Terraform.

Data Engineering: Hands-on experience or familiarity with data engineering pipelines and automated workflows.

Core Technical Stack: Experience in developing software using Java/Kotlin and Spring Boot.

Traits

Self-Driven Independence: A proven track record of working effectively in small, autonomous teams with a strong bias for action, and getting things done.

Collaborative Spirit: Give and receive open, direct feedback, and work effectively with colleagues to solve hard problems.

Ownership and Accountability: Take responsibility for outcomes, decisions, and the full lifecycle of the services you deliver.

Key facts

What you will do

Designing scalable services from idea to live traffic while maintaining uptime and performance standards.

Creating automation engines that help security teams handle threats and responses at company scale.

Partnering with engineers across product lines to deliver shared tools and infrastructure for efficiency.

Guarding code quality through strict reviews, testing standards, and reliable distributed system designs.

Running services yourself using pipelines and infrastructure tools for resilient cloud deployments.

Owning data pipelines and workflows so analysts can process events reliably and securely.

Championing open source practices by contributing patterns and reusable components back to ecosystems.

Mentoring peers on best practices and guiding decisions for resilient backend architectures.

Requirements

You must have built production software for at least five years in large environments.

You need deep knowledge of distributed systems and domain driven design patterns in practice.

You should manage infrastructure using code tools, especially Terraform in cloud environments.

You must write clean code and tests that ensure scalability and security for services.

You need professional English skills for clear communication and documentation.

Nice to have

Experience with SRE or security automation monitoring and response platforms.

Hands on Kafka streaming platforms and event driven architectures.

Background in data engineering pipelines and automated workflow systems.

Experience with Java, Kotlin, and Spring Boot for backend services.

Skills and tools

Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka.