Senior Backend Engineer
Senior Software Engineer — Backend
Engineering · Dubai, UAE · Full-time
Every line of backend code you write at Justlife moves the real world. Our dispatching engine routes thousands of trained professionals to real homes across the GCC — over 15 million sessions and counting. Backend here isn’t a back office; it’s the engine of the business.
We’re the region’s leading super-app for home services, scaling fast across the UAE and KSA, and we’re building an AI-first engineering organization. We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who wants to own hard problems at scale — and help shape how we build, not just inherit it.
What you’ll own
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you’ll take end-to-end ownership of services that sit at the core of our marketplace — setting technical direction in your domain, raising the engineering bar, and mentoring the engineers around you. A few of the problems you’ll work on:
- Smart matching at scale: the customer-to-supplier dispatching algorithms that match demand to the right professional in real time
- Live operations: real-time order tracking and the availability & assignment systems behind it
- Platform & integrations: designing and optimizing APIs for third-party integrations, with API-first development and end-to-end API testing
- Data & reliability: database modeling, a safer and more flexible attribute-management system, and performance at scale
- Experimentation & AI: A/B experimentation structures and prototyping with AI tools to ship and learn faster
What we’re looking for (must-have)
- Strong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience with Spring Boot (MVC architecture, RESTful services)
- Deep comfort with relational databases (MySQL) and ORM frameworks such as Hibernate
- Experience designing distributed, high-throughput systems — message queues (RabbitMQ) and caching (Redis)
- Solid grasp of SOLID principles, object-oriented design and design patterns, with strong code quality and testing discipline (unit and integration tests)
- Senior-level ownership: you can take a service from design to production, make sound technical trade-offs, and lift the people around you
Nice to have
- Experience with NoSQL (MongoDB)
- Exposure to AI agents and automation frameworks — a real plus as we build AI-first
- Cloud and container experience (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
- Comfort with Git-based workflows and CI/CD
- Experience with PHP
One thing to know
Part of this role is helping us evolve a legacy PHP 7 service (Symfony / Doctrine) and migrate it onto our Java platform. If you see that as an ownership opportunity rather than a chore, you’ll fit right in. You’ll also join our on-call rota — we keep it fair, shared, and well-supported.
Why Justlife
You’ll join a tight, high-trust engineering team with real autonomy and an entrepreneurial culture — 200+ full-time team members, 25K+ service professionals, and a genuine people-first ethos. We invest in your growth: mentorship and coaching, training, fast-track career paths, and a fair, objective performance system. We also take care of the everyday — an extra day off on your birthday, free Justlife credits to enjoy our own services, recognition through our JustHeroes program, and a referral bonus when you bring in great people.
How we hire
We respect your time and keep our process clear: a first conversation with our People & Culture team, a technical interview with our hiring manager, a case study with a deeper system-design / problem-solving session, and a final conversation with the engineering leadership. We aim to move quickly and keep you informed at every step.
Everyone’s welcome
Justlife is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire on the strength of your skills and potential, and we welcome applicants of every background, nationality, and experience. If you’re excited about this role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you.
Join the tribe and let’s become #everydaybetter, together.