Backend Engineer (Java)

About Zowie:

At Zowie, we’re all about pushing boundaries in customer experience. Our AI solutions are designed to help businesses connect faster, personalize better, and solve smarter. Top online brands (True Classic, Modivo, MediaMarkt, et al.) trust Zowie’s AI agents to be on the front-line of their customer care efforts (>1.2M conversations monthly) - to give their customers rapid support, speak their brands’ voice, drive customer loyalty, and boost their revenue. With just 1 out of every 1,000 website visitors talking to customer service globally, we believe that a well thought-out AI can tap into this gap and unlock tremendous value by bringing speed and empathy to customer interactions.

We’re a team of over 100 very ambitious individuals on a mission to do just that.

What you'll do:

You’ll join our Java team that works on the challenging goal of redesigning important parts of Zowie’s architecture - building a low-latency central message delivery platform. The end goal is to easily connect Zowie with different channels such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and others. A lot of exciting work awaits - designing our systems with reliability, performance, and extensibility in mind. You’ll also have an opportunity to learn about exciting technologies like speech to text and text to speech and try out real functional programming by occasionally reading or writing some Scala code. We value outcomes over processes, believe in automatic tests, and use of Ports and Adapters practices in our services.

Despite being compact, we efficiently manage and enhance a sophisticated system comprising over 100 microservices, predominantly coded in Scala and Java. These microservices communicate synchronously through gRPC, handle asynchronous calls via Kafka, expose GraphQL to the frontend, and leverage databases like PostgreSQL, Mongo, ElasticSearch, or Redis.

At Zowie, our engineering ethos is centered around the tangible impact our work has on our users. It's not just about meeting predefined requirements. It's about having a substantial influence on the overall solution. We believe in the empowerment of our engineers to contribute not only to code but also to the strategic decisions that shape our product. This requires a holistic understanding of the business, the product, and the technology at play. Your expertise will enable you to connect the dots and provide valuable insights to guide the best course of action.

Autonomy and meritocracy are at the core of our values. We champion the idea that sound arguments should prevail. As part of the team, you'll be instrumental in shaping end-to-end solutions, influencing architecture decisions, and proposing crucial enhancements to our engineering practices.

Our daily routine aligns with industry standards, including regular planning sessions, standups, timely code reviews, and close collaboration with fellow engineers.

Think of our teams as startups in a startup. We value efficiency and therefore the only constant you should expect is Retrospective. Everything else is being constantly adjusted to fit the changing needs.

We will be happy to be fully transparent with you; tell us what you want to know!

Ideally, you'll bring with you:

• Excellent coding skills and passion for growing expertise
• Strong experience with JVM languages
• Excellent knowledge of SQL and relational databases
• Strong communication, so you can actively listen and easily explain complex technical issues with simple business and product words
• Excellent system design skills that allow you to choose technologies and architectures wisely
• Experience with Distributed systems
• Product acumen, ownership, and focus on value delivered for the customers
• Working proficiency in English and Polish (both spoken and written)

It will be awesome if you have:

• Experience with Spring framework
• Experience with NoSql databases
• Experience with Kafka or other message brokers
• Experience with GraphQL
• Experience with Docker Swarm / Kubernetes

We are:

• Ambitious and innovative. We never settle. We always look for better ways of doing things. 

• Like a sports team. We take ownership of our work and believe in personal accountability. At the same time, we work together, support each other, and focus on winning as a team. 

• Unafraid of change. The market we're in is changing rapidly and we thrive in this ever-evolving environment. 

• Growing fast. You’ll have a lot of autonomy and impact as we grow.