With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

The Senior Software Engineer is responsible for designing, standardizing, and scaling integration solutions across the enterprise. The role focuses on building a unified integration ecosystem by defining best practices, reusable patterns, and platform capabilities (APIs, events, and messaging).

The engineer will contribute to evolving the Integration Platform, improving system interoperability, reducing complexity, and enabling teams to build reliable, scalable integrations aligned with enterprise standards.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable integration solutions using APIs, messaging, and event-driven patterns.
• Define and enforce integration standards, best practices, and reusable architectural patterns across teams.
• Evolve and maintain core platform capabilities such as API registry/catalog, integration templates, and shared libraries.
• Identify “integration bad-smells” (e.g., point-to-point coupling, anti-patterns) and work with teams to refactor them into standardized solutions.
• Contribute to the design and rollout of a distributed event streaming platform (e.g., Kafka) and event-driven architecture.
• Support teams in adopting integration patterns, providing guidance, code examples, and architectural reviews.
• Collaborate with platform, product, and engineering teams to enable scalable and governed system integrations.
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance of integration flows.
• Explore and apply AI capabilities to improve integration development, documentation, testing, and governance.

Core Competencies:

• Integration Architecture – designing scalable, decoupled system integrations using proven patterns
• Platform Thinking – building reusable capabilities rather than one-off solutions
• Standardization & Governance – defining and enforcing integration best practices across teams
• Event-Driven Design – applying asynchronous communication and streaming architectures
• Developer Enablement – simplifying adoption through templates, tooling, and guidance
• AI-Augmented Engineering – leveraging AI to improve SDLC efficiency and engineering outcomes

Required Qualifications:

• Strong experience in backend/software engineering using one or more languages such as Java, Kotlin, or Python.
• Proven experience building integrations using REST APIs, messaging systems, or microservices.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and integration patterns (e.g., synchronous vs asynchronous, orchestration vs choreography).
• Experience with API design, versioning, and governance practices.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka or equivalent).
• Experience with cloud platforms and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and automation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience designing or operating an integration platform, API management solution and Event Streaming solutions.
• Experience with tools/frameworks such as Apache Camel, Spring Boot, or equivalent integration frameworks.
• Familiarity with API catalogs, service registries, and developer portals.
• Experience implementing observability (logging, metrics, tracing) for distributed integrations.
• Exposure to domain-driven design (DDD) and enterprise architecture practices.

AI & SDLC Expectations:

• Openness to leverage AI tools in daily engineering work (code generation, documentation, testing, analysis).
• Experience integrating AI into SDLC processes is highly valued.
• Ability to identify opportunities where AI can improve integration quality, developer productivity, or platform adoption.

Impact: This role will directly contribute to:

• Reducing integration complexity and technical debt
• Increasing reuse through standardized patterns and platform capabilities
• Accelerating delivery of new business capabilities
• Enabling a shift towards event-driven, scalable architectures across the organization

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.

#LI-Hybrid