Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Role overview A hands-on technical leadership role guiding a large engineering collective of 30–70+ engineers across multiple squads. The position partners with engineering, product, and design leadership to shape strategy, set the technical bar, and deliver high-impact outcomes on distributed, data-intensive banking systems.

Responsibilities - Partner with engineering directors to shape technical and product direction across a collective, aligning multiple squads with company-wide priorities. - Stay hands-on in coding and architecture while setting direction from the front. - Collaborate with product and design leaders to define strategy, shape roadmaps, and make pragmatic trade-offs that maximise customer and business impact. - Mobilise teams around the most important problems, bringing clarity, alignment, and pace while knowing when to slow down for safety and sustainability. - Lead architectural decisions for the most complex systems, ensuring cohesive, scalable designs that span multiple teams. - Uphold a high bar for technical excellence across quality, reliability, and scalability, and actively mentor senior engineers and emerging leaders.

Requirements - Proven track record leading complex, high-impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams. - Strong technical judgment combined with product and business awareness, with the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs. - Hands-on experience with scalable backend, distributed, or data-intensive systems. - Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and helping teams define direction and execute. - Demonstrated ability to influence and align senior stakeholders across engineering, product, and beyond. - A focus on outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions, and a passion for mentoring and raising the engineering bar.

Nice to have - Familiarity with Go, Cassandra, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP, React, or feature-store tooling such as Feast, given the stack the teams rely on. - Experience contributing to open-source projects or public technical writing.

Benefits and work setup - Base salary range of £155,000 – £200,000 plus equity. - Based in London, with flexibility for distributed working across the UK and ad hoc meetings in the London office. - Relocation support to the UK and visa sponsorship available. - Flexible working hours, trust-based approach to output, and openness to part-time arrangements. - £1,000 annual learning budget for books, training, or conferences. - Company-provided laptop and additional support for fully remote home-office setups, alongside a wider benefits package. - Structured interview process of roughly 3–4 weeks covering a recruiter call, initial call, system design interview, take-home task or pair coding exercise, and a final behavioural and leadership interview.