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 y