Staff Engineer
Staff Backend Engineer — Distributed Systems / Golang Up to £170,000 + Bonus + Equity
We’re currently partnered with one of the fastest-scaling cybersecurity businesses globally, a profitable, product-led organisation of approximately 600 employees that has already achieved unicorn status and is on track to almost double there sales this year due to partnering with over 5000 enterprise clients.
Following sustained international growth and significant enterprise adoption, the company is now entering the next phase of technical scale and platform maturity. As part of that evolution, they’re investing heavily in the expansion of their UK engineering organisation and are looking to hire two Staff Backend Engineers to help lead some of the most business-critical architectural initiatives across the platform.
This is not a role centered around incremental feature delivery. The engineering function is currently undertaking a broader transformation programme focused on rebuilding core platform systems with an AI-native mindset, decomposing and rewriting legacy services into Go, and redesigning critical infrastructure to support increasingly complex distributed workloads operating at extremely high throughput and ultra-low latency.
A major focus of the role will involve designing systems capable of consistently achieving sub-50ms response times across highly concurrent environments, while balancing resilience, scalability, observability, and operational simplicity.
The successful candidate will operate at a Staff level across multiple engineering domains, influencing architectural direction, partnering closely with senior leadership, and acting as a technical multiplier across backend and platform teams.
You’ll be expected to contribute not only through hands-on engineering, but through systems thinking, technical strategy, and long-term platform design.
Key areas of responsibility include:
• Architecting and evolving distributed backend systems designed for scale, fault tolerance, and low-latency execution
• Leading the redesign and migration of core services into Golang within a modern cloud-native environment
• Driving architectural decisions around concurrency models, event-driven systems, data flow optimisation, and service communication patterns
• Improving platform observability, reliability, and performance characteristics across mission-critical systems
Requirements:
• 10–15 years of software engineering experience
• Significant commercial experience building backend systems with Golang
• Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture and large-scale backend design
• Strong experience working on low-latency, high-throughput systems in production environments
• Expertise across concurrency, networking, systems optimisation, and reliability engineering
• Track record of influencing technical direction across teams or wider engineering organisations
• Comfortable operating within fast-paced, product-centric scale-up environments
• Interest in AI-native engineering workflows, tooling, and modern software delivery practices
The package is up to £170,000 base salary, performance bonus and strong equity. You would be expected to travel expected approximately 10–12 times annually