Software Engineer Backend (f/m/d) (Fixed-Term Parental Leave Cover)

Who We AreSpread Group is a renowned global provider of customized apparel and lifestyle products, distinguished by our commitment to made-to-order technology. Our core business model revolves around producing precisely what our customers desire, precisely when they desire it. As pioneers in this space, we combine sustainability with on-demand personalization, enabling individuals and businesses to express their unique identities through bespoke creations. Join us to be part of a global leader in the exciting world of personalized apparel and lifestyle products! As we continue to expand our business, we are seeking a curious and passionate individual to join our team as the Software Engineer Backend (f/m/d) and drive our business forward. The position is initially a fixed-term position to cover parental leave. What Will Your Role BeYou'll join Design Experience — the team behind the tools people use to turn an idea into something they can actually wear. We own the creation experience across our brands: the Create-omat design editor, AI-assisted design generation, template and text handling, embroidery, and the design services behind them. Our mission is to let anyone move from idea to product with the market's leading creation tools, and every order on our platform starts with a design that was made on one of our surfaces. We are a small, senior team in Leipzig and Berlin with a product owner, a tech lead and a handful of engineers, which means the person who designs a service is usually the person who ships and runs it. Our stack spans two worlds: Create-omat is a Next.js application in TypeScript that currently also carries its own backend-for-frontend, while the surrounding services run on the JVM with Spring against MySQL, MongoDB and S3. The AI side runs on OpenAI and fal.ai models with Langfuse for tracing and cost control, and everything ships through GitLab CI onto Kubernetes. This is a fixed-term position covering a parental leave. It is not a placeholder role: the backend work waiting for you is the part of our roadmap that decides what the next two years of our architecture look like. What You´ll Do  Pull business logic out of the Create-omat BFF and into services other  frontends can actually use — today the design editor owns logic, data and storage all at once, and that is the single biggest constraint on the team Build our design generation backend: moderation, image generation, design enhancement and background removal as a pipeline that Create-omat, the Partner Area and our upcoming co-creation agent all call, instead of each building their own Replace splitbrain, the Spring service that serves the Partner Area with a near-duplicate of that same functionality — two systems, one capability, and your job is to make it one Design and build the system-layer APIs behind our data — Scene, Template and Design — so that MongoDB and S3 stop being something every consumer reaches into directly, and take part in the cross-team API discussions where those contracts get agreed Modernize designer-service-api, a Java service with real consumers in two other teams: raise test coverage, retire vulnerable dependencies, and coordinate every contract change with the teams that depend on it Own services in production — observability, alerting, on-call-quality logging, and the performance questions that come with rendering and image pipelines Work with a product owner, designers and frontend engineers in an agile team, and connect what you build to whether people finish a design and put it in  their basket What You´ll BringSeveral years of professional backend experience with services you carried from design to production and then operated Solid JVM skills — Java or Kotlin with Spring — including data modelling, migrations and the parts of a service that only hurt once traffic is real Working proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript, enough to be productive inside a Next.js backend-fo