The Role
We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join our engineering team in a high-impact technical leadership role. You'll work on our most challenging technical problems, own parts of our platform's architecture, and help shape the technical direction of our backend stack.
Our tech stack centers on Go microservices, with Temporal workflows, MongoDB and ElasticSearch running on Kubernetes in GCP. You’ll work with modern patterns including event-driven architectures, gRPC and REST APIs, and comprehensive observability with Grafana Cloud.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical direction and architecture for parts of our platform
- Design and build complex backend services and systems that scale
- Drive technical decisions that affect multiple teams
- Establish patterns, standards, and best practices that others will follow
- Lead complex technical initiatives from design through implementation
- Identify and address systemic technical challenges across our backend
- Write exemplary Go code that sets the standard for quality and design
- Mentor engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar
- Balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery
- Influence technology choices and architectural direction
- Collaborate with engineering leadership on technical strategy
- Build new systems and features while improving our existing architecture
Qualifications
Essential
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep expertise in Go, with mastery of concurrency, performance optimization, and advanced patterns
- Proven track record of designing and owning large-scale systems
- Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or similar complex systems
- Deep understanding of databases, particularly MongoDB or similar NoSQL systems
- Extensive experience with microservices architecture and inter-service communication
- Expert-level understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Experience establishing technical standards and patterns across teams
- Strong architectural thinking with ability to balance trade-offs
- Track record of mentoring and developing other engineers
- Ability to drive technical initiatives with minimal guidance
- Experience influencing technical direction at an organizational level
- Excellent communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical concepts
Highly Desirable
- Experience with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration systems at scale
- Deep knowledge of event streaming platforms like Kafka
- Experience with LLMs and AI integration (particularly for Investigations team)
- Background in SaaS platforms or B2B products at scale
- Expert-level knowledge of observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, etc.)
- Deep understanding of authorization patterns, security, and multi-tenancy
- Experience with protobuf and gRPC
Tech Stack
- Languages: Go
- Databases: MongoDB
- Messaging & Orchestration: Temporal, Kafka
- APIs: REST, gRPC, protobuf
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP
- Observability: Grafana stack
- AI: LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini), RAG systems
Success Measures
In your first 6 months, you will have:
- Owned and driven a significant technical initiative to completion
- Established new patterns or improved existing ones across teams
- Mentored multiple engineers, visibly raising technical standards
- Contributed to architectural decisions
- Been recognized as a technical authority in your domain
- Made measurable improvements to system reliability, performance, or scalability
- Influenced the technical direction of our backend platform
Benefits
- Work with a rewarding and fulfilling career with opportunities, challenges and resources to do your best work.
- Own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme.
- Private health insurance to keep you in tip‑top condition.
- Life Insurance.
- Unlimited holidays – uncapped, take the time you need, when you need it.
- £1k professional development fund per year to learn new skills.
- Support to realise your fullest potential, always.
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