Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
About the Role
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.
What You’ll BuildYou 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.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain backend services and data pipelines using Java
- Implement and evolve event-driven architectures to handle high-volume, real-time data streams
- Deploy and operate cloud-native services on AWS, ensuring scalability and reliability in production
- Define and maintain API schemas in close collaboration with front-end engineers to ensure clean data contracts
- Build observability into services from the start - metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing
- Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices to support continuous delivery
- Work closely with DevOps, computer vision, and product engineers across the squad
- Participate in architectural decisions, particularly around data flow, storage strategies, and service boundaries
Skills and Experience
Required
- 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
Nice to Have
- 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
