Backend Engineer

At Kpler, we are dedicated to helping our clients navigate complex markets with ease. By simplifying global trade information and providing valuable insights, we empower organisations to make informed decisions in commodities, energy, and maritime sectors.

Since our founding in 2014, we have focused on delivering top-tier intelligence through user-friendly platforms. Our team of over 850 experts from 69 countries works tirelessly to transform intricate data into actionable strategies, ensuring our clients stay ahead in a dynamic market landscape. Join us to leverage cutting-edge innovation for impactful results and experience unparalleled support on your journey to success.

About the Role As an Engineer II within our Engineering Maritime & Logistics division, you will play a pivotal role in designing, building, and operating high-throughput data processing and API distribution systems. You will take end-to-end ownership of real-time streaming applications, backend services, and reliable pipelines that deliver critical maritime intelligence to global consumers via Kafka, Flink, and Snowflake. By maintaining platform resilience and scaling event-driven architectures, your work directly powers the actionable insights our clients rely on to navigate complex global trade.

Design, build, and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs using TypeScript, Java, and PHP. Develop and operate real-time data pipelines and stream-processing applications utilizing Apache Kafka, Flink, and Kafka Streams. Drive end-to-end ownership of backend services from initial technical design through deployment, continuous monitoring, and production operations. Monitor system health, throughput, and consumer lag across streaming infrastructure to maximize data freshness and platform uptime. Investigate production incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and implement preventative architectural improvements. Reduce technical debt by continuously improving software maintainability, system observability, automated testing, and CI/CD practices. Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, platform teams, and peer engineers to translate complex maritime business requirements into scalable solutions.

What you'll need (Must-haves) 3+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering backend services and APIs. Proven proficiency in at least two core backend programming languages: Java, TypeScript, PHP, or Scala. Hands-on experience building and operating data pipelines or stream-processing applications in production cloud environments (AWS). Direct experience operating services on Kubernetes and delivering changes using GitOps workflows. Solid understanding of database design, SQL, data modeling, and distributed systems fundamentals. Nice-to-haves Production experience with Apache Flink and Kafka Streams. Exposure to Test-Driven Development (TDD) and modern observability tooling (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting). Background working on systems where low latency, high throughput, and data freshness are critical operational requirements.