About this role.
Catawiki is hiring a senior Backend Engineer to build and operate scalable, resilient microservices for a high-traffic online marketplace. The role supports product verticals spanning demand, supply, or fulfilment and carries end-to-end ownership from design through deployment, maintenance, and improvement. Candidates need 7+ years of object-oriented software development experience, backend-service expertise, API and SQL knowledge, and experience with customer-facing e-commerce, fintech, or SaaS products. The team uses Ruby primarily, although prior Ruby experience is not required, and works in autonomous cross-functional Agile teams. This is a hybrid Lisbon-based position requiring at least two days per week in the office.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
4/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would explain the service boundaries, traffic profile, availability goals, and the architecture chosen to meet them. I would cover resilience measures such as timeouts, retries, idempotency, observability, database indexing, caching where appropriate, and how I validated performance under load.
I treat deployment as the start of operational ownership, establishing monitoring, alerts, runbooks, dashboards, and clear service-level indicators. I review incidents and production signals, prioritize reliability and maintainability work alongside features, and ensure documentation remains current.
I would begin with user journeys and domain rules, then define stable resource boundaries, request and response contracts, validation, authentication, authorization, pagination, and error semantics. I would version conservatively, make operations idempotent where needed, document the API clearly, and partner with client engineers early.
I would identify the technical and customer risks, break the work into safe incremental changes, protect behavior with tests and metrics, and use feature flags or parallel paths if needed. I would communicate trade-offs with stakeholders and measure the outcome through reduced incidents, improved performance, or faster future delivery.
I make the decision criteria explicit, such as customer impact, reliability, delivery risk, operational cost, and long-term maintainability. I listen to alternatives, share evidence through prototypes or data when useful, document the decision, and support the agreed direction once the team has aligned.
At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary! Whether it’s Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 Car, a Woolly Mammoth’s Skeleton, Lady Gaga’s Jumpsuit or Usain Bolt’s running shoe, we encounter exceptional objects every day.
We’re a one-of-a-kind marketplace for buying and selling special objects. Each week, more than 100,000 unique items are auctioned, all carefully curated by our passionate in-house experts.
Having sold over 25 million unique objects, our mission is to become the world’s most popular destination for special objects. As a growing, diverse and sustainable scale-up, we proudly live by three core values. If these values resonate with you, we’d love to explore how you can join us.
- Taking ownership and driving impact
- Being open to change and feedback
- Being passionate about our mission and our customers.
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 Office a minimum of 2 days per week.
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.
Why You’ll Love Working with Us
- Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business.
- Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression.
- A culture of connection defines us. We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work.
- Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to “Pursue Your Passion”. We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.
Our Offices and Way of Working
Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.
Interested?
Apply with an English CV and Cover Letter. By applying, you agree to Catawiki’s Applicant Privacy Policy. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Annual salary information is not provided for this position. Explore salary ranges for similar roles in our Salary Directory ›
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