Backend Engineer – Communication Platform

About the Communications Squad

The Communications Squad powers all self-service communications across SumUp — including SMS, email, push notifications, and WhatsApp. Today, we deliver around one billion messages per year, with ambitious plans to significantly increase both the scale and sophistication of our messaging capabilities.

In addition to messaging infrastructure, we build user-facing features such as promotions and personalized recommendations.

As part of the Platform Tribe, we design and own systems that enable product teams across SumUp to move faster. We build for two audiences at once: internal teams who depend on our platform, and the millions of merchants they serve.

This role is ideal for someone excited to dive deep into a product domain while tackling the engineering challenges of high-volume, mission-critical services. Success requires balancing robust engineering practices with thoughtful and impactful feature delivery.

What You’ll Do

• Build and evolve services: Develop, deploy, and scale high-impact services within our Messaging and Promotions domain using Go to deliver reliable and high-performance solutions.
• Improve reliability: Drive best practices in monitoring, alerting, and traceability while shaping tooling that empowers engineering teams.
• Shape architecture: Influence key decisions in our microservices architecture, balancing scalability, flexibility, and developer experience.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner closely with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver meaningful solutions for merchants.
• Mentor engineers: Share knowledge and foster a culture of curiosity, growth, and continuous improvement.
• Champion quality and security: Maintain high standards of code quality and ensure systems are secure, maintainable, and built for long-term success.

You’ll Be Great for This Role If You Have

• Experience: 4+ years building and maintaining high-traffic backend systems with strong expertise in reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Go expertise: Hands-on experience with Go (Golang) and a passion for clean, efficient, and maintainable code.
• Code quality focus: Commitment to strong test automation, linting, and formatting best practices.
• API design skills: Experience designing and building secure, scalable, and intuitive RESTful APIs.
• Observability knowledge: Practical experience with tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, and Honeycomb to build reliable production systems.
• Product mindset: Ability to think beyond implementation details and deliver real value to users.
• Mentorship experience: Experience supporting teammates’ growth in a collaborative, learning-focused engineering culture.

Why Join SumUp?

• 🌍 Global impact: Work on large-scale fintech products used by millions of businesses worldwide from our Berlin office (office-first setup).
• 🧑‍🔬 Learning culture: Participate in Hack Days every second Friday and global Hack Weeks.
• 🌈 Diversity & Inclusion: Join a workplace that values diverse perspectives and fosters an inclusive environment.
• 📚 €2,000 annual L&D budget: Invest in conferences, education, and career growth.
• 🚀 VSOP program: Own a stake in SumUp’s future success.
• 💶 Pension scheme: Company matching of up to 20% of your contributions.
• 🔄 30-day sabbatical: Take a fully supported sabbatical after 3 years of employment.
• 🔗 Referral bonus: Earn rewards for referring talented candidates.
• 🚵 Additional perks: Urban Sports Club subsidy, Kita placement assistance, relocation support, and subsidised office lunches.

Equal Opportunity & Workplace Commitment

SumUp is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer committed to building a diverse workforce. We do not make hiring or employment decisions based on race, colour, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected characteristic.

We are dedicated to maintaining a safe, respectful, and harassment-free workplace for everyone.

About Us

Be empowered to do more that matters.

At SumUp, our mission is to empower small businesses globally with simple and affordable tools that help them thrive. Today, over 4 million businesses across 36 markets rely on SumUp to manage payments, finance, and customer relationships.

Our diverse team of 3,000+ SumUppers from over 90 nationalities collaborates globally with an innovative mindset and shared values. We foster inclusivity, continuous learning, and a supportive environment where everyone can grow personally and professionally.

Join us and be part of a team driven by collaboration, innovation, and a shared vision of enabling businesses everywhere to succeed.