Staff Backend Engineer - Oviva Team

Staff Backend Engineer

We are currently looking for a Staff Backend Engineer with strong skills and proven experience, ready to dive into a fast-growing startup established in Switzerland, Germany, France, the UK, and Serbia, for a full-time engagement.

You would be joining Oviva, an award-winning digital healthcare provider that is transforming how dietitians support patients with diet- and lifestyle-related health conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. By combining cutting-edge proprietary technology with human-centered care, Oviva is enabling new models of treatment and making traditional nutritional counseling more effective.

Their Engineering team is made up of full-stack developers, software engineers, and data engineers - all passionate problem-solvers focused on building scalable, impactful solutions. They work on both patient-facing applications and internal web platforms.

As a Staff Engineer, you will be a key partner to Engineering Directors, Principal Engineers, and Product as well as Engineering Leadership. You will act across multiple engineering teams to align them on technical direction, drive large-scale initiatives, and ensure architectural cohesion across the platform. Your influence will be critical in shaping long-term technical roadmap and company's success.

Role Overview:

The Staff Backend Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the long-term health and direction of Oviva's backend services. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy to identify and solve their most critical technical challenges, often in areas that are loosely defined or cross multiple domains. Unlike a Senior Engineer who masters a specific domain, you will provide the technical vision and architectural guardrails for several domains. You will be a go-to expert for other engineers, leading by example with exceptional code, robust system design, and strategic thinking that anticipates future business needs.

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables:

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of large-scale systems or company initiatives, often across multiple teams.
• Define the long-term technical roadmap and architectural vision for key areas of Oviva's platform, and articulate the return on investment (ROI) to engineering leaders and other departments.
• Decompose complex business and system problems into clear, scalable, and elegant technical designs.
• Act as a technical lead on cross-team projects, ensuring that architectural principles and quality standards are met.
• Drive engineering excellence by identifying and resolving root problems while promoting best practices across the organization.
• Mentor senior engineers, providing deep technical guidance and fostering their growth into future technical leaders.
• Conduct technical interviews and assess the technical expertise of candidates during the recruitment process.
• Represent engineering in cross-functional discussions.
• Drive innovation by prototyping and championing the adoption of new technologies and methodologies, including the strategic use of LLMs and AI-driven development practices.

Essential Skills:

• Expert-level proficiency in Java and related frameworks and libraries
• Deep knowledge on middleware services & frameworks (such as relational databases, NoSQL databases, messaging systems, etc.) and nuanced understanding of their internals.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating complex, distributed systems at scale.
• Mastery of architectural patterns, domain-driven design, and data modeling for complex systems.
• Proven ability to influence and lead large, complex technical projects without formal authority.
• Exceptional ability to navigate and resolve technical ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.
• Critical and data-driven mindset in problem-solving and solution design.
• Active participation in technical guilds or communities of practices.
• Proficiency with cloud-native architectures, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code principles.
• You are fluent in English.

Desirable Skills:

• Driven by a strong curiosity in AI and cutting-edge tech, you're hands-on, experimenting with AI-powered tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot) to enhance productivity and code quality.
• Experience in presenting at internal tech talks, external meetups, or conferences.
• Extensive, proven track record of technical leadership and impact in a senior or staff-level engineering role.
• Recognized as a go-to technical expert and thought leader by peers and leadership.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Experience in a regulated industry, such as healthcare.
• Master in computer science or equivalent field.

Benefits:

• High-growth company in which you can find exciting and trend-setting challenges
• The opportunity to make a meaningful impact in revolutionizing healthcare
• Familial working atmosphere in an open-minded multinational team
• Flexibility with remote work, allowing you to create your ideal work environment
• All necessary equipment – up to you to decide what you prefer
• Covered private health insurance
• The budget for professional improvement (courses, conferences, books…)
• The budget for mastering English and German languages
• Nice office in Belgrade
• Fully stocked kitchen (tea, coffee, fruits, soft drinks, snacks…)
• Tournaments of table tennis, table soccer, and darts in our office
• Skilled and senior co-workers
• Opportunities to build products that really make a difference
• Opportunities to learn and grow with us

If you are looking for an environment where you can grow professionally, learn from the best in the field, balance work and life habits and have a pleasant and enthusiastic environment, please submit your CV in English.