Principal Java Engineer, Hawk-Eye Innovations

Football Squad

£74.8-98.4k

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Java

Kafka

Terraform

RabbitMQ

Prometheus

Spring

DynamoDB

Datadog

Senior and Expert level

Bristol

London

2 days a week in office

Sports officiating & broadcast technology

Be an early applicant

Sports officiating & broadcast technology

1001+ employees

B2BEntertainmentComputer VisionSportsMedia

Be an early applicant

£74.8-98.4k

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Java

Kafka

Terraform

RabbitMQ

Prometheus

Spring

DynamoDB

Datadog

Senior and Expert level

Bristol

London

2 days a week in office

1001+ employees

B2BEntertainmentComputer VisionSportsMedia

Company mission

To be the trusted choice for pioneering and inspiring change in sport.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

Expert-level Java 17+ & Spring Boot
Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor senior engineers
Strong experience with AWS (or other major cloud providers)
Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
Experience with designing and evolving microservices and complex distributed systems at scale
Thorough understanding of monitoring, logging, and traceability
Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
Ability to bridge the gap between technical details and business requirements in a fast-paced environment

Desirable

Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (GitHub Actions, Terraform)
Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Exposure to real-time data processing, low-latency systems and sports tech

What the job involves

Contract: Full-Time, Permanent
Hi, I’m Peter Laszlo, Backend Discipline Lead and hiring manager for this role
I’m excited to invite you to apply for the Principal Java Engineer position in our Football Squad at Hawk-Eye Innovations
If you're passionate about building scalable backend systems and want to work on high-impact projects for FIFA and UEFA, this could be the ideal role for you
As a Principal Java Engineer in our Football Backend Team, you'll play a key role in designing, developing, and optimising data-intensive backend services that power live football events
Our team is responsible for managing data feeds, event-driven processing, and cloud-based infrastructure to deliver real-time insights to global football leagues and partners
You’ll work in an agile environment, collaborating with engineers across our football backend team
Given the high-profile nature of our work, we operate in a fast-moving environment where efficiency and scalability are key to success
Develop, optimise, and maintain backend services using Java (Spring Boot)
Contribute to design decisions for new and existing projects
Work on football-related data pipelines that power FIFA, Serie-A and UEFA operations
Deploy and scale applications in AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, etc.)
Enhance system observability, ensuring real-time monitoring and logging using tools like Datadog
Work on event-driven architectures, leveraging message queues (Pulsar, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
Collaborate with engineers, stakeholders and external partners to meet high-impact project deadlines
Ensure system reliability and performance in high-traffic, real-time environments

Our take

Hawk-Eye Innovations, part of Sony, delivers technology that enhances fairness, safety, and excitement for thousands of sporting events worldwide. As a leader in vision processing, Hawk-Eye provides solutions for officiating, video management, poroduction, broadcasting, and digital experiences, helping teams, officials, and fans enjoy sports more effectively.

With a long list of clients, including Adidas, Fox Sports, and Nascar, Hawk-Eye has firmly established itself as a cornerstone of sports innovation. The company is constantly pushing boundaries, and is often called upon to create bespoke solutions tailored to the unique needs of sports leagues and broadcasters.

More recently, Hawk-eye partnered with the BNA for the 2023-2024 season, introducing 3D optical tracking technology to improve all accuracy and gameplay speed. Its an exciting space for the company and as demand for enhanced viewing experiences continues to grow, it will be interesting to see where the company goes next.