Backend Engineer (Java/Spring Boot), my first hire at Teatown
I'm Lucas, founder of Teatown, a software and observability engineering consultancy working with regulated enterprises across the German-speaking world.
Business is good. Good enough that I can't carry it alone anymore.
So I'm hiring the first person to build this with me.
Let me be straight with you, because it's the whole point.
You'd be employee number one.
No big team to disappear into.
No thick playbook to follow.
You'll own real work at real clients, mostly on your own, with my name riding on the outcome.
If that excites you more than it scares you, keep reading.
What you'd actually do
You'd take the lead on backend engineering for our clients. Java, Spring Boot, cloud-native.
Early on that means two things:
1 You become the go-to engineer for a client I'm about to bring on.
2 And you take backend work off my plate at a client I already serve, so I can breathe again.
But here's the part that matters most.
You won't just write code. You'll be the person the client trusts.
That means understanding what they actually need, and delivering it without being told twice.
I won't be looking over your shoulder. Frankly, I'm hiring you so I don't have to.
Because the moment the work leaves your hands and lands at a client, you're on the hook. And so am I.
The quality bar I care about most is the one you hold yourself to when nobody's checking.
What you need
Non-negotiables
1 At least 7 years building and running large-scale backends, with real Java and Spring Boot experience among them. The 7 years don't all have to be in Java or Spring. If you've spent years in another high-level language and know your way around Spring Boot too, that counts. What matters is that you can build and run backends at scale, and also build from scratch.
2 At least 7 years in cloud-native environments. Microservices, containers (Docker or Podman), ideally Kubernetes or OpenShift.
3 Experience leading a dev team or being t