Java Engineer - Backend Platform

Hawk-Eye Innovations - Budapest

Salary: HUF 1M - 1.5M per month

Contract: Full-Time, Permanent

Location: Hybrid - minimum 2 days per week in office, Budapest

We are looking for a Java Engineer to join a backend squad at Hawk-Eye Innovations. You will be working on a platform that delivers real-time athlete performance data to sports organisations globally. This is a hands-on engineering role where you will contribute to core backend systems from day one, in a fast-paced, collaborative team that values ownership and quality.

You will be a core contributor to a new backend platform being built from scratch. The work spans the full data journey - from ingestion at the edge through to storage, transformation, and delivery to end users. Key areas of focus include:

• Low-latency data pipelines that ingest and process live sports tracking data, with strict latency requirements for time-critical outputs delivered to coaches and analysts in near real-time.

• Event-driven processing using Kafka for streaming data and control messages between on-site devices and cloud services, handling both fast-path live outputs and asynchronous post-processing workflows via SQS and AWS Batch.

• Cloud infrastructure on AWS, including Greengrass for edge-to-cloud orchestration, S3 for video and data storage, and Lambda for lightweight processing tasks.

• Data transformation and aggregation layers that normalise tracking outputs, store them in a data lake, and make them available to downstream consumers via clean API contracts.

• REST and WebSocket APIs that serve both a live data product for immediate consumption and an insights portal for historical analysis and performance comparison.

• Observability and reliability - instrumentation, logging, and tracing are built in from the start, not bolted on. The platform needs to run 24/7 without on-site support.

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  Design, build, and maintain backend services and data pipelines using Java

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  Implement and evolve event-driven architectures to handle high-volume, real-time data streams

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  Deploy and operate cloud-native services on AWS, ensuring scalability and reliability in production

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  Define and maintain API schemas in close collaboration with front-end engineers to ensure clean data contracts

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  Build observability into services from the start - metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing

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  Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices to support continuous delivery

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  Work closely with DevOps, computer vision, and product engineers across the squad

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  Participate in architectural decisions, particularly around data flow, storage strategies, and service boundaries

• Strong Java experience - Java 11 or later preferred, with a focus on clean, performant code

• Hands-on experience with AWS in a production environment - S3, Lambda, SQS, and related services

• Experience building and operating microservices and distributed systems at scale

• Solid understanding of data pipeline design, including transformation, normalisation, and storage patterns

• Familiarity with observability tooling - Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent

• Experience designing or consuming REST APIs, with an understanding of schema management and versioning

• Comfortable working in an agile, fast-moving environment with evolving requirements

• Experience with Kafka or other message brokers - directly relevant to our stack

• Familiarity with stream processing frameworks such as Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, or Spark Streaming

• Experience with AWS Greengrass or edge-to-cloud IoT patterns

• Knowledge of data lake architectures and columnar storage formats such as Apache Iceberg or Parquet

• Experience with WebSocket-based APIs or other real-time data delivery patterns

• CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code experience - GitHub Actions, Terraform, or similar

• Exposure to low-latency or real-time data systems in any domain

Hawk-Eye is committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We ensure all employees are treated fairly, regardless of gender, marital status, race, nationality, religion, age, disability, or union membership. We value diversity and strive to create an environment where everyone can reach their full potential.

If you are passionate about building high-performance backend systems and want to work on real-time data products at scale, we would love to hear from you.