Senior Backend Engineer (m/f/d)

Location: Come and join us in Barcelona!

We are looking for a talented and motivated Senior Backend Engineer (m/f/d) for our new Driver Onboarding team.

As part of a highly skilled, cross-functional team comprising Fullstack Engineers, Backend Engineers, a Product Manager, a Product Designer, a Data Analyst, and a technical Engineering Manager, you will help shape the future of mobility with FREENOW and assist our drivers in their daily work.

Our team is the cornerstone of the driver experience, with a core focus on streamlining the driver registration flow and ensuring the integrity of our platform through advanced document validation processes. Our mission is to provide a fast, frictionless, and secure onboarding journey for every new driver. We achieve this by:

• Designing and implementing the entire driver registration and onboarding journey, making it simple, intuitive, and fast.
• Developing and maintaining robust, automated document validation systems to ensure compliance and quick approval for drivers.
• Collaborating closely with Operations and other engineering teams to constantly optimize process automation within the document lifecycle.
• Providing self-service tools that empower drivers to efficiently manage their documentation and account details.
• Integrating key insights into internal systems, fostering collaboration across teams to improve the overall driver experience.

As a critical part of our company, this team's work directly impacts thousands of drivers and, ultimately, the experiences of millions of customers. Your contributions in this role will have a tangible and far-reaching effect on the lives of many.

As an engineer on our team, you will tackle the exciting challenges of building a best-in-class driver onboarding platform. This includes designing and building innovative, high-scale solutions for document validation and workflow automation, directly enhancing the start-to-finish experience for our drivers and ensuring the quality and compliance of our fleet. You'll be involved in every stage of product development, from ideation to implementation, ensuring a seamless and impactful experience.

We also value a mindset that challenges the status quo—constantly exploring new technologies and approaches to improve our products and maintain a state-of-the-art codebase. Beyond technical excellence, your contributions will help foster a collaborative and inspiring team culture, making our workplace an enjoyable and fulfilling environment.

YOUR DAILY ADVENTURES WILL INCLUDE:

• Own the Feature, Own the Code – feel responsible for what you create. It all starts with bringing in your feature ideas, goes over development, testing and ends in deploying your code and monitoring it.
• Design and develop systems based on product requirements or refactorings.
• Maintain and improve the existing systems by finding bottlenecks and performance issues and improving resource usage (DB access, cache, messaging, etc.).
• Collaborate with your team members in an Agile environment, contribute to and live our agile ceremonies.
• You care about teamwork: Be accountable for all topics above, but work together with the team on them.
• Stay on top of the latest technology trends and bring best practices to our daily work.

Our Techstack: Kotlin | Java | AWS | Docker | Git | Kafka | ElasticSearch & more

TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE:

• Passionate about Kotlin or Java.
• Experience with the quirks of Spring Boot or similar frameworks, automated tests and CI/CD tools.
• Familiarity with monitoring tools (i.e., Grafana, Datadog, Kibana etc.).
• Knowledge of microservices architecture.
• Keen about principles and practices of scalable web applications, such as RESTful API’s, dealing with transactions, and resiliency.
• Familiar with messaging by using Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• High level of creativity; there’s all the freedom to think outside the box.
• Be communicative, proactive, and always collaborative.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

Nice to have: 

• Experience working with AWS or similar cloud service providers.
• Familiar with Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.
• Experience with document automation validation.
• Experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-driven products.
• Experience in Python, particularly for data processing or AI integration tasks.

BENEFITS & PERKS IN A NUTSHELL:

• Flexible working arrangements

• LinkedIn Learning

• Sabbatical & special leave policies

• WeRoad partnership

• Birthday, 24th + 31st December off

• Short term EU work policy

• Mobility Credit

• Health Insurance

• Employee assistance program

DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION:

FREE NOW is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age.
We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work.

SEE WHAT OUR AWESOME COLLEAGUES SAY ABOUT US:

ABOUT FREENOW:

We are Freenow, the European taxi app with the broadest multi-mobility offering, available in 9 markets and over 180 cities. Our app gives millions of passengers the freedom to move with a wide choice of services including taxis, private hire vehicles, carsharing, car rental, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds and public transport.Headquartered in Hamburg and led by our CEO Thomas Zimmermann, we are on a mission to make urban mobility more efficient, sustainable and inclusive.Since July 2025 we have been part of Lyft, a global mobility platform connecting riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together we are building a more caring and connected world, creating new opportunities for innovation, growth and impact.