Frontend Focus Full Stack Engineer – Team Discover

We are currently hiring only candidates based in Bulgaria or the EU.

About the team:

We're Team Discover — and we shape how millions of users find the right products. For this role, you join Team Discover — an empowered product team at INTERSPORT Digital GmbH, Germany.

From search and navigation to category pages, filters, and recommendations — our domain sits at the heart of the customer journey. Every improvement we make directly impacts how people explore and shop across INTERSPORT's digital platform. That's not an abstraction: our work drives measurable business growth and shapes the experience for real customers every day.

We're a small, empowered team of 3–5 engineers with a dedicated Product Manager and a shared Designer. We own our product end-to-end — that means infrastructure, costs, availability, performance, new features, and everything in between. There's no separate ops team to throw things over the fence to. If it's in our domain, it's ours.

We're looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer with strong frontend expertise who wants to help shape what product discovery looks like at INTERSPORT — and who thrives when given real ownership over real problems.

What makes this role interesting:

You'll build systems that matter, not just features. Our team doesn't just ship UI — we're evolving the entire discovery stack. Whether it's building internal tooling, making build-vs-buy decisions for core capabilities, or improving how our platform performs at scale — what we work on gets decided together as a team. You'll have a real voice in shaping what comes next, and the problems are foundational ones that determine what's even possible for the product.

You'll work in a team that's still being shaped. INTERSPORT Digital transitioned from fully agency-built software to 100% in-house engineering over the last two years. The entire company was verticalized into empowered product teams following Team Topologies principles. That transformation is real and ongoing — you'll be joining a team that's actively defining how modern product engineering works here. That means influence, but it also means navigating a company that's still growing into this way of working. We're steering toward a culture where engineering and stakeholders aren't separate sides of a table — we're one team, jointly responsible for the success of the product.

You'll own problems, not just code. Engineers on our team actively participate in defining what we build and why — priorities are set together, not handed down. You'll work closely with our Product Manager, but you're expected to think about the product, the user, and the business — not just the implementation.

Your profile:

This is a senior role. We're looking for someone who has built and shipped complex software across the full stack, has learned from enough systems to know what works — and has the humility to revise those views when proven wrong. Someone who is still actively learning and evolving. Most people who fit this description have around 5–6+ years of experience — but if you got there faster, don't let that number stop you from applying. We'd rather miss a threshold than miss a great engineer.

You're a strong frontend engineer who thinks in systems. You don't just build components — you understand how SSR works, why performance matters for e-commerce, how the browser renders, and what happens between the user's click and the server's response. You've built and maintained complex web applications, ideally with server-side rendering and microfrontends.

You're genuinely full stack. Our frontend surface area is larger, so that's where you'll spend more of your time. But you're equally comfortable writing backend services, working with event-driven systems, designing database schemas, and deploying infrastructure. You think end-to-end, not in layers.

You have a product mindset and think in data. You think about why you're building something, not just how. You've asked "should we even build this?" in a planning meeting. You know how to set up the instrumentation to measure whether something actually works, and you use that data to drive decisions — not ship and hope. You care about the user's experience and can reason about trade-offs between technical purity and business impact.

You're self-driven and comfortable with imperfection. In a small team with high autonomy, there's no one assigning your work in granular detail. You notice what needs doing, propose solutions, and follow through. You're comfortable with ambiguity, can make progress without perfect information, and find it energizing — not frustrating — to help shape a team and company that's still growing into its way of working.

You're collaborative, not just cooperative. We have a strong huddle and pairing culture. We pair when it's useful, not by mandate. We challenge each other's ideas respectfully. We want someone who makes the whole team better, not just ships their own code faster.

You embrace AI as part of how engineering is evolving. The way we build software is changing, and we're actively figuring out what that means for our team and our workflows. We already use AI tools in our daily work, but this isn't a solved problem — we need people who are willing to adopt, experiment, and help drive how AI changes the way we engineer. If you're excited about shaping that rather than waiting for someone else to figure it out, you'll fit right in.

Your responsibilities:

• Collaborate on projects for international clients
• Develop backend services and performant, accessible frontend applications with modern web technologies, taking ownership from design to deployment and operation
• Evolve the entire discovery stack — internal tooling, build-vs-buy decisions for core capabilities, and platform performance at scale
• Actively participate in defining what we build and why; priorities are set together, not handed down
• Set up the instrumentation needed to measure whether what you shipped actually works, and use that data to drive decisions
• Write clean, tested, and maintainable code
• Help maintain and improve the team's infrastructure, including observability tooling
• Contribute to system architecture and design discussions
• Solve complex tasks and develop multi-tiered solutions
• Work in an agile environment and exchange experience and knowledge with colleagues

Technologies we work with:

Here's what our stack looks like today. You don't need to check every box — we hire for engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn, not for a perfect technology match.

• Frontend: Preact, Vite, SSR, TypeScript, PostCSS, custom microfrontend architecture
• Backend: Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB
• Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3), Pulumi (TypeScript), GitLab CI/CD
• Tooling: Datadog, Algolia, Unleash, Vitest, Playwright

If you've worked with similar technologies — React-family frameworks, JVM languages, event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure — you'll find your way. What matters more is that you understand the underlying concepts and aren't afraid to pick up what you don't know yet.

Required education and skills:

• Professional experience building and running production systems across the full stack, typically around 5–6+ years
• Solid knowledge of frontend fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript) and hands-on experience with modern frameworks like React, Preact or Vue
• Experience building and maintaining complex web applications, ideally with server-side rendering
• Solid knowledge of Java and/or Kotlin with Ktor, Spring Boot and/or similar enterprise frameworks for backend development
• Working knowledge of SQL databases and basic schema design
• Experience with automated testing, ideally end-to-end testing with Playwright or a similar framework
• Experience with a major cloud provider (preferably AWS) and CI/CD pipelines (preferably GitLab CI)
• Fluent written and spoken German
• Fluent written and spoken English

One or more of the following would be a bonus:

• Experience with microfrontend architectures
• Familiarity with microservice architecture, self-contained systems, or Domain-Driven Design
• Familiarity with server-side rendering concepts
• Experience with observability tools such as Datadog
• Experience with message brokers such as Apache Kafka or AWS SQS
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (preferably Pulumi; e.g. AWS CDK, Terraform)
• Experience with search and discovery platforms such as Algolia

What won't work:

Being transparent about this saves everyone time:

• If you need detailed specs to start working, this isn't the right environment. We define goals and problems together, but the "how" is often yours to figure out.
• If you prefer rigid processes, you'll struggle here. We take what's useful from agile and leave the rest — our refinements aren't textbook Scrum, and our cycles aren't sprints.
• If you want to stay in your lane, you'll feel constrained. We expect engineers to think about the product, talk to stakeholders, and care about what happens after deployment.
• If you need a large established team around you, know that we're 3–5 engineers. Your individual impact is high, and so is the expectation.

How we work:

We're fully remote and distributed — no mandatory office days, no hybrid-politics. Three times a year, the team meets in person to plan the next cycle, either at our Heilbronn headquarters or at an offsite. Those are the moments we invest in alignment and connection.

Day-to-day, we keep meetings minimal: a 15-minute standup, a refinement-style session, and a biweekly retro. That's it for recurring ceremonies. The rest of your time is yours for deep work, pairing, or huddles when you need them.

Language:

Our day-to-day communication happens in both German and English. You'll need to be comfortable working in both languages — German for much of the cross-functional collaboration, English for technical discussions and documentation. You can be based anywhere; residence in Germany is not required.

• Personal and professional growth opportunities
• 25 days paid leave yearly
• Additional health insurance
• Multisport
• Remote or home-office work possible
• Real ownership over a product domain that directly impacts customers and business growth
• A team that's building something new — not maintaining legacy, not following a playbook someone else wrote
• Work in a young and enthusiastic team
• Career and skill development