Senior Backend Engineer

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