Senior Backend Developer

Spenn Group is a technology company building and operating a loyalty platform with flexible points in the Nordics. Spenn Group provides shared, flexible points flowing freely across a range of leading consumer brands, including Norwegian, Strawberry, Uno-X, 7-Eleven, Narvesen, and REMA 1000, enabling cross-brand earn and redemption while preserving each brand's individual loyalty program. We launched in late 2024 and already have millions of users across the Nordics. We're growing fast and just getting started. This is a rare chance to join a small, ambitious team and help shape something that will touch millions of people's everyday lives.

Life at Spenn

We run as a modern, cross-functional organisation: small, autonomous teams across product, technology, data and commercial who work closely together.

The culture is high-performing and supportive. We are passionate, push things forward and challenge each other openly, and we eagerly celebrate wins together. Because Spenn sits at the center of a Nordic ecosystem, you also get to collaborate with strong engineers across our owners and partners and help shape modern architecture well beyond our own walls. We lean into modern tooling, including AI (Claude, GitHub Copilot), and we are flexible: we respect life outside work, while believing that being together at our office at Solli in Oslo is how we build culture and momentum together.

Senior Backend Developer

We're seeking an experienced Senior Backend Developer to join Spenn Group's Product & Tech team at our office in Oslo. With millions of users and transactions and three of the Nordics' largest brands behind us, every point earned and redeemed has to be handled correctly, every single time. The backend services you build are where that promise is kept.

As a Senior Backend Developer in our Backend & Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate the backend services that power Spenn's technology platform. You'll work on high-throughput, event-driven systems connecing brands to earn and use points across the Spenn Nordic loyalty ecosystem. You will take ownership of services end to end, from architecture and implementation to reliability in production, and help raise the engineering standards of the team.

Key Responsibilities

Backend development – Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable backend services in Java and Kotlin that power Spenn’s technology platform and partner integrations.

Event-driven architecture – Develop and operate event-driven services using Confluent Kafka, ensuring reliable, high-throughput processing of loyalty transactions and data streams.

Data management – Model and manage data across PostgreSQL and DynamoDB, balancing relational and NoSQL approaches for performance, consistency, and scale.

API & integrations – Design and maintain well-documented APIs that support the app, web, partner integrations, and internal services.

Quality & reliability – Write clean, well-tested code, participate in code reviews, and ensure observability, performance, and resilience of services in production.

Technical leadership – Mentor developers, contribute to architectural decisions, and help raise engineering standards across the team.

AI-Driven Efficiency – Utilize and advocate for AI coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude) to accelerate development without compromising quality.

Collaboration – Work closely with architecture, DevOps, product, and other engineering teams to deliver features end to end.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Several years of professional backend development experience, with strong proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin

• Hands-on experience building event-driven systems (with Kafka preferred)

• Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL stores (DynamoDB)

• Solid understanding of distributed systems, API design, and microservices architecture

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and CI/CD practices

• Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve development efficiency.

• Full professional proficiency in Norwegian (Danish or Swedish also fine) and English. Day-to-day work in Norwegian, while all documentation is in English.

• Experience in fintech or other regulated environments is an advantage.

Personal Attributes

• Automation-minded and reliability-focused, with strong ownership of the systems you run.

• Collaborative and clear communicator who enables other engineers to move faster.

• Proactive and structured, with a calm, methodical approach to incidents and risk.

• Curious and pragmatic, always looking to simplify and improve.

• Comfortable in a fast-paced, iterative environment with evolving priorities.

What we offer

This is a role where your work is felt by millions: every time someone across the Nordics earn or redeem Spenn on a flight, a hotel stay, or a grocery run, that transaction flows through the backend services you design and own. You get to build high-throughput, event-driven systems that sit at the very heart of the Spenn loyalty ecosystem, and take real end-to-end ownership, from architecture and implementation to reliability in production.

Being part of the Engineering team at Spenn it is our ambition to be a center of excellence for the wider ecosystem. Spenn drives the architecture and tech forums across our owners and partners (including Norwegian, Strawberry and Reitan), so you get to discuss and collaborate with strong engineers well beyond our own walls and take the driver's seat for modern architecture and software design decisions that shape how brands connect across the Nordics.

Last but not least, you will do this alongside a small, tight-knit engineering team with a high professional level and genuinely strong collaboration, where people share knowledge openly, review each other's code to raise the bar, help each other move faster, and enjoy the everyday work.