Senior Backend Engineer

Small-sided football is the world’s biggest game. Baller League is here to define it. Founded in 2024, Baller League was built by football fanatics who saw an opportunity to create something different: a new pathway for talent, a new stage for the game, and a new home for football culture. Across the UK and USA, our professional 6v6 leagues unite elite players, creators and fans in a football ecosystem that turns every matchday into a cultural moment. We’re not following the playbook. We’re writing it. We are building a movement that makes football more accessible, more engaging and more connected than ever before—democratising and defining a new era for the world’s game.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of the systems that power our products and operations. You’ll lead backend development, own our cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP, and make key architectural decisions that shape the future of the platform. You’ll have significant autonomy, influence, and responsibility—ideal for someone who thrives in fast‑moving environments and enjoys building from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the design, development and operation of the core backend services that power our consumer‑facing products and internal operational tooling.
• Build scalable, low‑latency systems that can handle real‑time updates and significant traffic spikes during live matchdays, using caching, load management and graceful degradation techniques.
• Lead the architecture and management of identity and user state, including authentication, profiles, preferences, permissions and privacy‑conscious data handling.
• Develop and maintain our notification platform, including push notifications (APNs/FCM), user notification preferences, audience segmentation and delivery tracking.
• Integrate with third‑party data providers and external services, ensuring robust failure handling, observability and system resilience.
• Design and support secure internal tooling APIs, including role‑based access controls, audit trails, change history and safe administrative workflows.
• Build and operate event‑driven systems using queues, background jobs and reliable processing patterns, including retries, idempotency and outbox architectures.
• Partner closely with the data function to implement analytics event collection, maintain event schema integrity and support downstream data and warehouse requirements.
• Own cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP, including provisioning, networking, IAM, security and cost optimisation.
• Manage CI/CD pipelines, deployments and environment configuration to ensure reliable and efficient software delivery.

What We’re Looking For

• Senior backend experience shipping production systems for high‑traffic consumer products, including spiky live‑event load.
• Hands‑on AWS experience of running and operating real production workloads, not just deploying to it.
• Strong Postgres and SQL: schema design, query tuning, migrations.
• Python‑first (FastAPI or similar).
• Redis: caching patterns, invalidation, pub/sub where appropriate.
• CI/CD fluency and comfort operating your own services.
• Engineering judgement: you care about correctness, resilience, and latency under load.

Nice to have

• Experience working with analytics and data platforms to support event tracking.
• GCP experience.
• IaC (Terraform).
• Integrating third‑party systems (identity, commerce, content, messaging).
• Serving both mobile and web clients; working alongside client‑side teams on design.

Baller Values / How We Work

• Football Obsessed. We don’t just follow the game - we live it.
• Change the Game. We challenge convention, move fast, and take ownership.
• Know the Score. We stay close to the numbers and sweat the details. Data drives performance.
• Stay Hungry. We bring energy, ambition, and the relentless drive to improve.
• Win Together. We back each other, celebrate collective success, and put the team first.

Why Join Baller League

Baller League is the fastest‑growing sports league in the world, and we’re just getting started. We’re intellectually curious, solutions‑driven, and we get things done. This is your chance to join a high‑growth business where you’ll have real ownership, direct impact and the opportunity to help shape what’s next. You’ll work alongside ambitious, talented people who move fast, think big and love what they do.

25 days annual leave plus bank holidays, private health insurance, access to every Baller League season game, Claude subscription provided, hybrid or remote working optional, Regent Street HQ in the heart of London, fully stocked office kitchen, snacks and drinks, regular team socials, events and football activities.

If you’re hungry, proactive and excited by the challenge of building something special, we’d love to hear from you.