Senior Staff Backend Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Staff Backend Engineer to own the design, delivery, and evolution of critical backend systems that power our core banking platform. You will shape the technical direction of complex, high-throughput services that process financial events and enable new customer features. This role involves partnering with cross-functional teams to translate business objectives into resilient, scalable, and secure technical solutions. You will lead by example, writing production-grade code while influencing architectural patterns across multiple squads. Your work will directly impact the reliability and performance of systems used by millions of customers. You will champion best practices in automation, testing, and operational excellence to raise the standard of engineering across the collective.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and drive the technical strategy for backend systems within your collective, ensuring alignment with product roadmaps and company priorities.

Lead the design, implementation, and operation of high-scale backend services, focusing on reliability, performance, and security in a financial environment.

Partner with product and design leadership to shape roadmaps and make trade-offs that maximize business and customer impact across the collective.

Mobilize engineering teams around complex problems, creating clarity, alignment, and momentum while balancing urgency with long-term sustainability.

Ensure cohesive architectural designs that span multiple teams, aligning local implementation decisions with broader system strategy.

Set a high bar for technical excellence by driving improvements in quality, reliability, scalability, and maintainability of backend services.

Mentor engineers at various levels, providing hands-on guidance and fostering a culture of ownership, learning, and rigorous code craftsmanship.

Contribute actively to open source where possible, sharing solutions and patterns that benefit the wider engineering community.

Collaborate with data and platform teams to optimize observability, logging, and monitoring for backend services to support proactive issue resolution.

Explore and evaluate new technologies and tools that can improve the efficiency, resilience, or performance of our backend infrastructure.

Own key parts of the production lifecycle, including deployment strategies, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement.

Build strong working relationships with other engineering collectives to identify dependencies, reduce bottlenecks, and enable seamless integration.

Champion security and compliance practices in backend implementations, ensuring that financial data and customer information are handled with the highest standards.

Encourage experimentation and learning by creating safe conditions for the team to prototype, test ideas, and iterate based on feedback.

Requirements

You have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex systems.

You possess deep knowledge of backend technologies, including distributed systems, data storage, and asynchronous processing patterns.

You are experienced in building and operating services that handle high concurrency, large data volumes, and strict reliability requirements.

You have a strong understanding of financial systems, regulations, and the constraints that apply in regulated environments.

You are comfortable making high-impact technical decisions and articulating the trade-offs to diverse stakeholders.

You demonstrate leadership through code and design, influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.

You have a history of mentoring engineers and contributing to the growth of others through feedback and coaching.

You are fluent in modern programming languages relevant to backend development and infrastructure tooling.

You are passionate about automation, testing, and maintaining high standards of quality and observability in production.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source projects at scale.

Background in fintech, payments, or regulated industries.

Practical notes

The compensation range listed reflects the minimum and maximum target values for this role.

This role is based in the UK and may involve travel within the UK for team collaboration or company events.

Candidates must be eligible to work in the UK without sponsorship.

Roles are filled on a rolling basis, so early application is encouraged.