Backend Engineer for George (all humans)

Make a difference in the financial life of millions of people: At Erste Digital you are co-creating the digital future, in which better financial health is possible. #believeinyourself

We are part of Erste Group – the largest banking group in Central and Eastern Europe with more than 2,500 branches and over 45,000 employees. Our more than 2,000 IT experts and enthusiasts are the bank's Digital Muscle.

Our George Platform Department is the Engineering and Architecture backbone of George, Erste Group's digital banking platform used by millions of customers across Central and Eastern Europe (Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Croatia). We build the shared frameworks, libraries, tooling and services that every product team relies on, so they can focus on banking features instead of reinventing boilerplate. On top, we direct how George Architecture evolves. Our work spans the backend and frontend  and mobile frameworks, CI/CD automations, observability, and developer tooling as well as Platform services that keeps hundreds of engineers productive and George reliable at scale.

We're looking for Backend Engineers to join our team and work on  the foundations that power backend development
across George. This is a high-leverage, high-impact role for engineers who care about developer experience, clean abstractions, and doing things well.

What to do:

• Evolve our frameworks, work on platform capabilities and services

• Build and maintain CI/CD tooling and automation 

• Improve observability and tracing across the platform 

• Collaborate cross-team, run PoCs, and share knowledge.

Must-haves:

• Strong professional experience in backend development with Spring Boot framework

• Solid hands-on experience with Kotlin

• Good understanding of REST APIs, build tooling (Gradle), and modern CI/CD practices

• A pragmatic, quality-focused mindset, clean code, testing, and clear communication

• Fluent English (written and spoken)

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience building libraries, frameworks or developer tooling (not just product features)

• Familiarity with Kafka / event-driven architectures

• Exposure to observability stacks 

• Container / cloud platform experience (Kubernetes, Helm, AWS)

• Interest in AI-assisted development workflows

Why you will like us:

• Real platform impact, your work is used by hundreds of engineers across 8 countries

• A collaborative, blame-free culture built on teamwork, professionalism and empathy (pair programming, hack days, continuous improvement)

• Room for own projects and ideas, and time to do things properly

• Modern tech stack and the freedom to keep it modern

• Possibility to benefit and learn from our international, talented and passionate community at Erste.

• Interest groups and clubs: Take part in discussions and get involved in projects. Numerous interest groups invite you to engage with a topic.

• Health Center – The Erste Campus operates a fully equipped health center that offers all employees a high standard of medical services during working hours.

• Employee benefits – Benefit from special conditions for financial services and insurances, supermarkets, clothing stores and many more.

• Employee Referral Program – Become a talent scout for career opportunities in IT. We are rewarding every successful referral for Erste Digital.

• A competitive and performance-related salary dependent on your professional and personal qualifications is granted - we have to state the minimum wage for this position in accordance with the Austrian IT-collective agreement: 64.554€ gross per year. But this is just a formality, we are more than happy to discuss your actual expectations!

The way we are:

Erste Group considers the diversity of its employees as key to innovation and success. As employer we are proud to offer everyone equal chances, irrespective of age, skin colour, religious belief, gender, sexual orientation or origin.