Senior Python Engineer (Contract)

Fliff unpacks sports gaming into social, free-to-play games for all types of sports fans. We've built a social sports gaming experience that allows users to compete for leaderboard positioning, to achieve badges and build their status within the game. We are pioneering play-for-fun sports gaming, with our flagship social sportsbook experience that includes sweepstakes promotions and loyalty rewards. We provide sports fans with fun, engaging, and free-to-play alternatives to real money gaming. We are looking for a Senior Python Engineer to own, design, build, and maintain high-performance distributed backend systems serving millions of users. You will be accountable for end-to-end delivery of scalable, reliable, and low-latency solutions using Python, Django, and Kafka. This role requires full working-hour alignment with Central European Time (CET ±2 hours) to enable daily, real-time collaboration with our Sofia-based team. We are only considering candidates located within this time zone range. Applicants outside CET ±2 hours will not be considered. What You’ll Do Take full ownership of backend services from design through deployment, maintenance, and continuous improvement Design, develop, and maintain scalable, high-performance distributed backend services using Python and Django Architect distributed systems to support millions of users with low latency and high availability Collaborate with product, frontend, and DevOps teams to ship reliable features on aggressive timelines Lead and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, architectural discussions, and knowledge sharing Own critical backend infrastructure components: APIs, data pipelines, message brokers (Kafka), caching Optimize systems for throughput, latency, fault tolerance, and resilience under heavy load Implement robust testing strategies: unit, integration, and performance tests Drive continuous improvement of development processes and system observability (monitoring, logging) Participate in on-ca