Staff Engineer

We are looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in core backend engineering, computer science fundamentals, and distributed systems. The ideal candidate is a highly accomplished engineer who can solve complex technical problems, design scalable and resilient systems, optimise performance at scale, and drive architectural decisions across engineering teams.

We value engineering depth over technology-specific experience. Candidates from Go, Java, C++, Rust, or other backend ecosystems are welcome, provided they demonstrate exceptional problem-solving ability, strong systems knowledge, and a track record of delivering technically challenging production systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role requiring both architectural ownership and the ability to dive deep into code, performance bottlenecks, concurrency issues, and production failures.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and evolve highly scalable, reliable, and performant backend systems.
• Own architecture and technical direction for complex services, platforms, and distributed systems.
• Solve challenging problems involving concurrency, parallelism, synchronisation, memory management, and resource utilisation.
• Design distributed architectures with appropriate consistency, fault tolerance, replication, partitioning, and failure-recovery strategies.
• Optimise critical execution paths, database queries, network communication, and resource-intensive workloads.
• Make sound architectural trade-offs involving latency, throughput, reliability, scalability, maintainability, and infrastructure cost.
• Lead technical initiatives spanning multiple services, engineers, and teams.
• Investigate complex production incidents and drive permanent solutions to systemic reliability and performance issues.
• Establish engineering standards for testing, observability, code quality, security, and production readiness.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence technical decisions through hands-on expertise and sound engineering judgment.

The core requirements for the job include the following:

Computer Science and Systems Fundamentals:

• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, computational complexity, and problem-solving techniques.
• Deep knowledge of operating systems, processes, threads, scheduling, memory management, and synchronisation primitives.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, TCP/IP, HTTP, connection management, and network failure scenarios.
• Practical understanding of concurrency, parallelism, race conditions, deadlocks, and performance bottlenecks.

Backend Engineering:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial ownership of complex backend systems.
• Expert proficiency in at least one production-grade programming language, such as Go, Java, C++, Rust, or an equivalent language.
• Strong grasp of language runtime behaviour, memory allocation, garbage collection or ownership models, and profiling techniques relevant to the chosen stack.
• Experience building robust APIs, backend services, and reusable platform components.
• Ability to write clean, efficient, testable, and maintainable production code.

Distributed Systems and Architecture:

• Proven experience designing distributed systems and service-oriented architectures.
• Strong understanding of replication, partitioning, consistency models, idempotency, retries, timeouts, and failure handling.
• Experience with asynchronous processing, message queues, event-driven architectures, or distributed workflows.
• Ability to identify and reason about bottlenecks, partial failures, cascading failures, and system-wide reliability.
• Strong system design skills, including evaluating architectural alternatives and documenting trade-offs.

Databases and Data Systems:

• Strong understanding of relational databases, indexing, query execution, transactions, isolation levels, and query optimisation.
• Experience with database performance tuning, caching strategies, and data modelling.
• Familiarity with NoSQL systems, distributed storage, and data partitioning strategies where relevant.

Performance and Production Engineering:

• Demonstrated experience profiling applications and resolving CPU, memory, I/O, latency, or throughput bottlenecks.
• Experience operating production services with meaningful availability, reliability, and performance requirements.
• Understanding of monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, incident management, and root-cause analysis.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency, or resource-intensive backend systems.
• Experience with database internals, storage engines, networking stacks, compilers, runtimes, or operating-system-level engineering.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience leading multi-team architectural initiatives and reducing systemic technical debt.
• Contributions to open-source systems projects, developer tooling, or performance-critical libraries.
• A demonstrated record of measurable improvements in latency, throughput, reliability, or infrastructure efficiency.