Principal Backend Software Engineer

Company Description

foodpanda is part of the Delivery Hero Group, the world’s pioneering local delivery platform, our mission is to deliver an amazing experience—fast, easy, and to your door. We operate in over 70+ countries worldwide. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Delivery Hero has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017 and is part of the MDAX stock market index.

Job Description

We are seeking a dynamic Principal Backend Software Engineer to join our Growth Tribe, which focuses on products designed to help us acquire, retain, and grow our customer base. In this role, you will lead the design and development of our backend systems, ensuring they are scalable, reliable, and built for extensibility.

You will have a significant impact on how we build and deliver backend services that power our products. Equally important is your ability to empower and mentor colleagues, helping them grow in their roles. You will serve as a role model in introducing change, demonstrating that ambitious goals can be achieved. By inspiring and rallying other engineers, you will help drive innovation and ensure we accomplish even the most challenging projects.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience with backend systems, including service-oriented architectures, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure. You are comfortable working with CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, and have a passion for building efficient, reusable, and high-performance components. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to deliver consistent, reliable, and scalable experiences for our products that directly impact customer growth and engagement.

Join us in creating products that help our customers discover, engage with, and love our platform. Every system and service you build will enhance user experience, accelerate growth, and contribute to long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty across diverse markets.

Key Responsibilities:

• Backend Architecture & Strategy: Lead the architecture, development, and implementation of backend systems, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with the long-term vision of the Growth Tribe.
• Reusable Service & API Development: Design and implement scalable services, APIs, and shared modules that can be leveraged across multiple products. Establish best practices for creating reusable backend components that promote efficiency, consistency, and maintainability.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with product, UX, and frontend teams to understand requirements and ensure backend capabilities support both current and future product needs, enabling growth-focused initiatives.
• Performance & Optimization: Lead efforts in system performance monitoring, tuning, and optimization, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient resource utilization. Identify and resolve system-wide issues in databases, caching layers, message queues, and other backend components.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure that backend systems adhere to security best practices and regulatory standards. Integrate security, data protection, and compliance features into the architecture to safeguard customer and company data.
• Leadership & Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and guidance to backend engineers, mentoring senior and mid-level staff. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, raising the technical bar across the team.
• Research & Innovation: Stay up-to-date on the latest backend technologies, cloud platforms, and system design patterns, and drive long-term innovation by introducing cutting-edge solutions that improve scalability, reliability, and growth metrics.

Qualifications

What you can bring to the table:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent education or practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in backend engineering, with a strong focus on scalable, complex systems, distributed architecture, and service-oriented design. Proven experience in guiding engineering strategy at an organizational level.
• Strong expertise in backend programming languages and frameworks (preferably Go) and a deep understanding of system design, APIs, and microservices architecture.
• Extensive experience with building and operating high-performance, highly available backend systems, including databases, caching, message queues, and event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency in designing modular, reusable, and maintainable backend components for large-scale systems. 
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment workflows for backend services.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor engineering teams, providing technical direction, promoting best practices, and fostering collaboration across cross-functional teams.
• Strong track record of aligning engineering strategies with company objectives, balancing speed, quality, and impact.
• Experience in performance tuning, debugging, and optimization of large-scale systems, including expertise in concurrency, distributed computing, database optimization, and reliability engineering.
• Passion for driving innovation and building systems that scale with growth, especially in customer-focused products that acquire, retain, and engage users.

Additional Information

What we offer:

• A dynamic and challenging work environment.
• A company committed to developing you personally and professionally.
• A great working atmosphere with regular company and team events.
• A vibrant and international team committed to diversity and inclusion.
• Responsibility from day one in a fast growing and global company.
• Other benefits include free food, health and dental insurance, and learning and development opportunities!

foodpanda is operated by Delivery Hero Group (“DH Group”) - the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating in 70+ markets across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Delivery Hero started as a food delivery service in 2011 and now employs 40,000+ people globally. Additionally, Delivery Hero is pioneering quick commerce, the next generation of e-commerce, aiming to bring groceries and household goods to customers in under one hour and often in 20 to 30 minutes. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Delivery Hero has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017.

In July 2024, Delivery Hero SE merged three of its market-leading food delivery businesses, foodora and Yemeksepeti in Europe, and foodpanda in Asia. All three businesses now make up the second-largest organization within the Delivery Hero Group, and leading food and QCommerce delivery in 18 markets in both regions.