Software Engineer - Core Services (All Genders)

tl;dr

We’re looking for someone who keeps our football data right: results, stats and market values players can trust, especially right after the final whistle.

Main information

• Start: Immediately
• Location: Office Cologne, Berlin, London or remote
• Type: Full-time
• Team: Core Systems

Is this a match?

The basics - so we both know if it could work.

• Flexible: Hybrid from Cologne, Berlin or London, or remote within the EU or UK - we'll find the mix that works for you.
• 5+ years in: You've been a software engineer with a data focus for 5+ years, still write production code yourself and have owned a pipeline or dataset in production end to end.
• Self-starter: Drop you into a codebase with years of history and you'll find your way - reading the code, the data and the git log yourself, and asking "why does it look like this?" before you change it.
• Agent-native: We build with Claude Code every day. Whichever coding agent you've used so far, you plan with it, review every line it writes, and own what ships.
• Small steps, shipped often: Tests first, small merge requests, a teammate reviews - then it's live. That's our rhythm.
• Football-curious: You don't need to know everything about grassroots football yet - but you want to understand how it works, inside out.
• English first: It's our working language. We're an international team, though, so you'll also hear German, Spanish, Dutch and more around the (virtual) office.

What you'll do - your playing field

This is how you move our mission forward every day.

• You keep our football data right. Results, lineups, goals, appearances, stats and market values: you make sure what reaches the app matches what happened on the pitch - and what our users tell us happened there.
• You build and run data processing services. Python services and pipelines that turn match data from many sources into the teams, players and stats in our app - tested, monitored and ready for the weekend peak.
• You make data quality measurable. Validation, monitoring and alerts - and when something's off, you fix the root cause, not just the symptom.
• You become one of our football data experts. Age groups, season changes, renamed and merged teams, duplicate players, players who remember the match differently - you learn how grassroots football data really behaves and turn that knowledge into rules our systems enforce.
• You think about the player at the end of the pipeline. A missing goal or a wrong appearance is someone's weekend. You care how data shows up for players and clubs, not only whether the job ran.

In addition to your core responsibilities, you will also:

• Shape how our data models evolve, together with the engineers who own data acquisition and processing
• Support our data and business colleagues on the technical side of data requests – the queries, data pulls and checks behind analyses for internal teams and partners
• Build small internal tools so our support and product colleagues can check and fix data themselves

What you bring to the team

We're not looking for a perfect CV. But you should recognise yourself in these points.

• Data pipelines: You've built and run production data pipelines that others relied on.
• Python: You've shipped Python services with tests and code review.
• SQL & data modelling: You're strong in SQL and model data cleanly on PostgreSQL or similar.
• Data quality: You've owned the quality of a dataset – with checks, monitoring and gaps made explicit.
• Messy data: You've made data you don't control reliable – inconsistent names, duplicates, late corrections and all.
• Communication: You explain a data problem clearly to people who don't write SQL.
• Tools: Python, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, AWS, Kubernetes, GitLab CI, Grafana, Metabase, Claude Code

Good to know

We want you to know what this role really looks like from day one.

• This is a software engineering role with a data focus: you write Python services and pipelines, not only SQL models and DAGs. Most of your time goes into getting football data right and keeping it that way.
• You join Core Systems, where backend and data work as one team. You'll take over an existing domain with a lot of history, so you'll be working on your own fairly quickly – with the team there to explain the why.

Bonus

Not a must – but this'll definitely earn you extra points.

• You've built ingestion pipelines from external sources like club homepages – and kept them running when those sources changed
• You have a football background: you've played, coached or helped run a club
• You've built dashboards or reports for non-technical users
• You've worked with a mobile or frontend codebase (Flutter is a plus), enough to follow how data reaches the screen when you're tracing a bug

The Prematch Setup

We want you to love joining us – and still love being part of the team a long time from now.

• Employee participation (VSOP) – You benefit directly from the company's success.
• Modern tech setup – We provide the tools and devices you need to do your best work.
• AI-powered work – We use AI tools to work smarter and more efficiently, and provide you with the tools you need to make the most of AI in your day-to-day work.
• 27 days holiday per year – For proper rest and recharging. And if you're a parent, we have a special arrangement so you can balance family and time off even better.
• Remote work – Depending on how far you live from the office and your role, you'll work 1-3 days a week in the office and the rest flexibly remote – however works best for you. For Tech & Product, 100% remote is sometimes possible.
• Offices in Cologne, Berlin, London + virtual – Whether Berlin, Cologne or London – you get to choose. And our virtual office keeps the whole team closely connected across locations. Fancy a change of scenery? Just work from one of our other offices for a bit.
• Work from anywhere – A week of sun abroad or a few days at the family's? No problem – you can work flexibly from outside your home base.
• Team events – Whether after-work in Cologne, Berlin or London: we bring our teams together regularly – to connect, hang out and grow even closer as a team.
• Offsites with the whole team – Four days away from the everyday with the whole team: travelling together, spinning ideas, working side by side and experiencing real team spirit.

Still here? Sounds like a pretty good match.

If you've made it this far, we hope we've managed to show you one thing: how we work, what we believe in and why this role at Prematch is something special.

Maybe this is exactly the moment you've been waiting for: a team that thinks big, a vision that actually moves things and the chance to help reshape amateur football digitally – together with us.