Backend Software Engineer-Lead

We're hiring a
Backend Software Engineer, Lead
to take on a pivotal role within one of our high-impact, cross-functional product development teams. As a senior individual contributor, you'll lead by example - shaping system design, mentoring engineers, and driving the technical direction of your team. You will work closely with peers across Product, Architecture, and Engineering to ensure that we deliver scalable, secure, and maintainable systems that meet user needs.

This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys both building software and elevating the capabilities of those around them. You'll be expected to influence architectural decisions, champion engineering best practices, and contribute to the growth of a culture grounded in technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Who We Are

Pollard Digital Solutions - Europe is a full-solution supplier of lottery management and iLottery technology for lottery markets. We're a division of Pollard Banknote Ltd - a leading partner to 60 lotteries worldwide, known for high quality instant ticket products, licensed games, retail merchandising solutions, and innovation. Established in 1907 and headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, Pollard Banknote is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (PBL).

Our objective is to deliver the most innovative solutions that will render industry-leading returns to good causes in an ethically responsible way. We pride ourselves on a collaborative and inclusive workplace - where creativity, team spirit, and respect are core to how we work.

What We Offer:

• A truly collaborative and supportive working environment
• Modern office space with on-site parking
• Private health insurance
• Coverage for medical treatments outside of Serbia
• Learning and development budget
• Profit sharing – every role plays a part in our success
• Budget for sports activities
• Team-building and social activities
• Employee referral bonuses
• Hybrid work environment

What You'll Do:

• Lead technical direction for a cross-functional development team, breaking down complex challenges and guiding high-quality engineering solutions.
• Deliver production-ready software end-to-end: design, build, and maintain scalable backend and/or full-stack systems that are secure, observable and resilient.
• Set and uphold coding standards and software quality practices through code reviews, pair programming, and mentorship.
• Shape and evolve the system architecture, collaborating closely with Architects and Engineering Managers to align on long-term technical goals.
• Take part in the full software development lifecycle - from ideation to production monitoring. Drive technical discovery and delivery planning, contributing to the refinement of team backlogs and proactively identifying risks or opportunities.
• Own code quality: write clean, well-tested, maintainable code; adopt CI/CD, logging and telemetry practices; address technical debt and support your team in continuously improving software quality.
• Mentor and grow other engineers, providing guidance, feedback, and technical coaching across the team.
• Collaborate deeply: participate in code reviews, pairing, and shared learning sessions; work with Product and Architecture to scope and deliver features that bring value to our users.
• Improve the way we build: refine pipelines, tooling, and team processes to improve flow and make development more reliable
• Operate what you build – participate in on-call/incident rotations, using SLOs and blameless retros to drive reliability.

Who You Are:

• A pragmatic and experienced engineer with a deep understanding of building and operating distributed systems at scale.
• A natural problem solver who can simplify complexity and make sound architectural decisions under uncertainty
• A strong communicator who can align technical decisions with business goals and collaborate effectively across roles.
• An advocate of high-quality engineering practices—automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and security-by-design.
• A mentor and multiplier who helps elevate the skills of those around you, both formally and informally.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and change, and helping others do the same.

What You'll Need:

• 5+ years of professional experience in software development (backend, full-stack, or related roles) with demonstrated success in technical leadership roles.
• Proven ability to design and deliver scalable, maintainable, and secure backend or full-stack systems in production.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and influencing team-level engineering practices.
• Strong command of system design principles, API development, data modelling, and asynchronous communication patterns.
• Proficiency in Java and other modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., JavaScript/TypeScript, Go).
• Familiarity with cloud-native development, microservices, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code concepts.
• Deep understanding of iterative software delivery best practices and the full SDLC.
• Ability to communicate clearly and collaborate effectively within a team.

If you're looking to join a company where your technical skills and ideas can make a meaningful impact, we'd love to hear from you. Apply today and let's build something incredible together.