Full Stack Developer (Back End & Systems) Contractor or Perm

About Us

We’re a digital entertainment company creating engaging online platforms people love. Since 2021, we’ve been building something different. Our brands include MetaWin, WOW Vegas, BetZoo Media, Hit.com and Rolla with more to come. With teams operating from London, Malta, Gibraltar & Miami each platform is designed to offer unique, engaging, and innovative digital experiences. From immersive betting platforms to exciting casino games and interactive online entertainment, our brands deliver cutting‑edge technology and user‑focused design. Arena prioritises the use of innovative technology, decentralised where possible and builds with an AI first mindset to create the highest quality end product for our users. Not challenged by legacy systems, we are blue sky thinkers changing the landscape of digital entertainment.

Overview

We’re assembling a core engineering strike team of ambitious builders. This isn’t a corporate job it’s an opportunity for engineers who want to create, ship, and evangelize world‑class software at speed. For this role we will consider contractor or permanent applications. Our products span multiple systems and use‑cases, and we’re looking for a full‑stack engineer who leans strongly toward backend and systems work: building the foundations that keep things fast, reliable, scalable, and real‑time. You’ll help shape how we architect and evolve services, messaging, data, and APIs across our ecosystem while contributing across the stack when needed. Just as important: you’ll help us push an AI‑first engineering culture, where applied AI tooling meaningfully accelerates delivery and improves quality.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain systems across our product ecosystem with clean, scalable code.
• Improve and evolve backend foundations: service architecture, messaging/event flows, data reliability, and real‑time delivery.
• Participate in system design, architecture discussions, and scaling strategies, keeping things simple, robust, and observable.
• Move fast: prototype, iterate, and ship improvements in days, not months, then harden what works.
• Use and evangelize AI‑assisted workflows across the team to increase shipping velocity and quality.
• Own work end‑to‑end: ideation → execution → deployment → monitoring.
• Mentor peers in best practices, especially around AI‑assisted development and building operable systems.

Candidate Profile

Experience: ~5 years professional engineering experience with a strong portfolio of shipped projects (startups, open source, or commercial).

Mindset: Hungry, ambitious, comfortable wearing multiple hats in a small team. Bias for action. Obsessed with outcomes, not process.

Systems Focus: You’ve built and operated backend systems where correctness, performance, and reliability matter. You enjoy making things faster, safer, and easier to run.

AI Evangelist: You already use AI tools daily to accelerate coding, refactoring, debugging, testing, and architecture work — and you can explain (concretely) how it improves your output.

Cultural Fit: Builder mentality. Thrive in chaos. Strong ownership. Low ego, high standards.

Technical Stack – We don’t expect you to tick every box, we care about strong fundamentals and being effective in a small team.

Core

• Backend / Systems Engineering: Experience building performance‑sensitive services and real‑time systems: concurrency, messaging/event flows, state management, and designing for reliability.
• Systems‑level languages (examples): Not tied to one language, but you’ve used “systems / performance‑oriented” languages in production (e.g., Go, Rust, C#, C++ or similar) and are comfortable working close to the metal when needed.
• Architecture: You can design how components fit together: service boundaries, communication patterns, data flow, and pragmatic scaling approaches.
• Applied AI (core): Practical experience using AI tooling in day‑to‑day engineering (coding, debugging, automation, data/feature work, and system design).
• Databases: Strong with Postgres (plus real production experience: migrations, indexing, performance, safe changes). Familiarity with Redis and caching patterns.
• APIs & Real‑time: Designing and operating APIs and real‑time delivery (e.g., WebSockets or equivalent), and building systems that can handle spikes and sustained load.

Helpful

• DevOps familiarity: Comfortable collaborating on deployments, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure decisions not necessarily the dedicated DevOps owner.
• Frontend contribution: Able to contribute when needed (we use modern web stacks), but this role is primarily backend/systems.

Bonus

• Web3 experience (Solidity/EVM/Sui/Solana).
• Deep experience with real‑time systems, trading‑style systems, or high‑throughput event pipelines.
• Experience building AI‑powered features or integrations beyond “using AI tools” (e.g., production LLM features, evals, RAG, agentic workflows).