Senior Backend Engineer (all genders)

We're building the next-generation backend that powers Germany's largest reusable-packaging network - a circular-economy deposit-return system live across 17,000+ locations. It's a two-track hybrid modernisation (brown and greenfield), cloud-native, event-driven TypeScript platform that runs real-world operational logistics: partners, point-of-sale, returns, billing, and fulfillment at national scale, expanding internationally. 

You'll join as a (senior) engineer (all genders) with real ownership: designing, building and own core services and working directly with our technical lead and peers on architecture. This is not a ticket-taking role - you'll shape the system, not just implement against it. 
 
What you'll do: 

• Design, build and own core platform services: partner management, point-of-sale, billing and invoicing, returns, fulfillment, and contract management
• Build event-driven, async-heavy integrations between services and external systems -outbox patterns, queues, retries, dead-letter handling
• Help drive our international expansion
• Partner with the technical lead on architectural decisions, data modelling, and the incremental extraction of capabilities from our existing platform into the new one
• Set the engineering bar-testing, observability, and operational readiness baked in from day one

 

Our stack:

• Language: PHP (7.1) (current),TypeScript (Nextdirection)
• Framework: Shopware 5.3 and NestJS
• Data: Mariadb, PostgreSQL + Prisma
• Cloud: Google CloudPlatform - Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks
• AI: Claude (Code, Chat and Cowork)
• APIs: REST
• Platform: GCP
• Existing platform (you'll learn its domain): PHP / Shopware the current production system we're incrementally extracting from.

• 7–10 years of backend engineering, with deep production experience in Node.js, TypeScript and substantial hands-on NestJS in production plus ability to work with legacy PP2 (PHP) code
• Strong system design and execution - you've designed distributed, async/queue-heavy systems and shipped them, not just white-boarded them
• Solid relational data modelling and SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL ideally)
• Comfortable owning a problem end-to-end: design, build, test, ship, operate
• Munich-based. This is a hybrid role: 2 days/week in our Munich office, rest remote
  
  

Working with AI coding agents (a real part of this role) 

We use AI coding agents (Claude Code) every day as a core part of how we build. We expect you to as well. Concretely, we're looking for someone who: 

• has shipped production code with an AI coding agent,
• can describe their workflow - how they spec, prompt, review, and integrate agent output,
• has informed opinions on where agents fail and how they guard against it (review discipline, tests, architectural guardrails)

This isn't a buzzword for us - it's how the team works, and our hiring process reflects it (below). 
 

Nice to have 

• Event-driven/ CQRS /outboxexperience
• Google CloudPlatform
• Migrationorlegacy-extractionexperience(incrementallyreplacinganoldersystem)
• Comfortablereadingunfamiliarorlegacycodebases
  
  

How we hire 

• First Interview with People & Organisation (~25 minutes) - We want to get to know you better in a first meeting and you will get to know RECUP's culture, values and vision and understand yourself better for a mutual fit
• Meet Hiring Manager (Tech Leader) (~25 minutes) - Understand the RECUP platform from a technical perspective
• Our take-home case (~55 minutes) is AI-agent-assisted by design - use your preferred agent, as you would on the job. We don't test memorized syntax; we assess engineering judgment: how you specify work, catch and correct the agent, and make architectural decisions. Expect a brief take-home plus a live pairing and design session
• Meet the Team (Tech Lead and Engineer) + live AI coding session (extension of our take-home test) (~55 minutes) - Experience working with your new team.
• Meet our Co-CEO (~25 minutes) - Gain insight into our product and business