Senior Backend Engineer (JVM/Kotlin)

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Our Values

• Dream big — Be visionary, strategic, and open to innovation
• Build great things — Work in service of our users, always improving and pushing higher
• Take ownership — Take responsibility with bold decision-making and bias for action
• Win like a sports team — Be trusting and collaborative while empowering others
• Learn and grow fast — Never stop learning and iterate fast
• Share our passion — Share ideas and practice enthusiasm and joy
• Be user obsessed — Empathetic, inquisitive, practical

About the team

You will join a distributed team across Europe and Asia with shared time for collaboration such as planning, retros, stand‑ups and brainstorming sessions. While you will get support from QA and Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps experts, you will own your production environment to enable Goodnotes on all platforms. You will build our new APIs and services to bring a smooth experience to dozens of millions of users and soon many more.

About the role

This is the role for you if you\’re excited to work on the following responsibilities:

• Architect and design scalable solutions that are easy to maintain to allow the development of exciting features and support more users.
• Implement elegant solutions with clean code.
• Enable communication across multiple Mobile, Web Frontend, Backend Services and QA teams.
• Define and drive the completion of new initiatives and features by removing blockers for the team.
• Continuously improve the development practices through research, automation, documentation and testing.
• Share your knowledge and experience with the rest of the team.

The skills you will need to be successful in the above

• Mastery in at least one JVM programming language, primarily Kotlin (also Java or Scala).
• Good knowledge of idiomatic Kotlin and familiarity with the Kotlin concurrency model.
• Experience running high‑performance, high‑load JVM workloads on Kubernetes (e.g., AWS EKS) and AWS Lambda services.
• Good understanding of modern distributed databases; experience with CockroachDB is a distinct advantage.
• Expertise in identifying access patterns, defining optimal relational data models and indexing strategies.
• Knowledge of non‑relational distributed databases.
• Previous experience building client‑facing APIs and deep understanding of L7 protocols (HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, WebRTC).
• Expertise in cloud storage, deployment and computing (AWS preferred, other platforms welcomed).
• Knowledge of infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK.
• Experience in building collaborative real‑time tools or data synchronization/backup solutions.
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals.
• Led the development of complex systems from inception to millions of users.
• Robust software engineering practices, testing and automation are no secrets for you.
• Excellent problem‑solving and storytelling skills.
• Love of software craftsmanship and a strong desire for self‑improvement through side projects and sharing.
• Good sense of the best tools for any task.

Even if you don\’t meet all the criteria listed above, we would still love to hear from you! Goodnotes places a lot of value on learning and development and will support your growth if needed.

The interview process

• An introductory call with someone from our talent acquisition team.
• A short online coding skills test.
• A live coding call with one of our engineers.
• A call with your hiring manager.

What\’s in it for you

• Meaningful equity in a profitable tech startup.
• Budget for things like noise‑cancelling headphones, setting up your home office, personal development, professional training, and health & wellness.
• Sponsored visits to our Hong Kong or London office every 2 years.
• Company‑wide annual offsite trips.
• Flexible working hours and location.
• Medical insurance for you and your dependents.

We have processes that allow us to hire in many countries across Europe and Asia; however, some locations we are unable to hire within and may offer non‑permanent contracts to accommodate within.

Employment is contingent upon successful completion of background checks, including verification of employment, education, and criminal records.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood our Candidate Privacy Notice, which provides important information about the data we collect during the application process. You can find it here.

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