Staff Software Engineer - Platform

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer – Platform based in United Kingdom.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will define the long-term technical vision for a large-scale, event-driven streaming platform that powers real-time financial services. You will take ownership of the architecture, from the event backbone and shared client libraries to user-facing streaming infrastructure. Working primarily with Go and Redpanda, you will influence engineering standards, guide architectural decisions across teams, and help modernize systems through event-driven design. You will also contribute to authentication, developer experience, quality engineering, and AI-native development initiatives. This is a senior technical leadership role combining strategic direction, hands-on engineering, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship in a globally distributed environment.

Accountabilities
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Own platform architecture and technical strategy

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Define the end-to-end architecture and two-to-three-year roadmap for the event streaming platform, including Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming services.

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Lead the transition from batch-based processing to event-driven architectures across the organization, partnering closely with the teams responsible for individual systems.

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Establish engineering standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, event replay, idempotency, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.

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Build reliable, scalable real-time systems

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Design and optimize streaming infrastructure to support high-volume client connections, connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, message ordering, and delivery guarantees.

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Anticipate and address complex failure scenarios, particularly during periods of high market volatility.

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Own and evolve shared libraries and internal services used by multiple engineering teams.

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Influence security and platform-wide engineering

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Help shape authentication and authorization architecture, particularly where identity management intersects with streaming subscriptions, long-lived connections, token lifecycles, and multi-tenant isolation.

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Contribute to developer experience, quality assurance, and AI-native engineering initiatives, ensuring that platform schemas, contracts, and event streams support agent-driven development workflows.

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Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering on chaos testing and resilience exercises, and with QA teams on test tooling and pre-production release gates.

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Provide technical leadership and operational ownership

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Drive architectural alignment across teams through technical proposals, design reviews, and influence rather than formal authority.

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Mentor senior engineers, share expertise, and delegate meaningful technical work that supports the growth of others.

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Participate in the platform on-call rotation and act as a technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure.

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Manage deployments and contribute hands-on across application code, infrastructure configuration, logs, metrics, and operational troubleshooting.

Requirements:

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Professional experience and technical expertise

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At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including several years operating systems at significant scale.

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Strong production-level expertise in Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention policies, delivery guarantees, and performance under load.

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Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale using technologies such as WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), or gRPC streaming, with a solid understanding of fan-out, backpressure, and slow-consumer management.

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Proficiency in Go, or deep experience with another strongly typed programming language and the ability to become productive in Go quickly.

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Experience building or maintaining shared libraries used across multiple teams, with a practical understanding of API stability, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.

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Solid experience with relational databases, including core database concepts applicable to PostgreSQL.

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Infrastructure, security, and operational skills

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Strong Kubernetes knowledge beyond the basics, including the ability to write Helm charts and apply security best practices; relevant professional experience or certifications are expected.

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Demonstrated expertise in at least one adjacent area: identity and access management, developer tooling and continuous integration, or testing and system resilience.

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Experience designing and operating distributed systems, with the ability to investigate production issues using logs, metrics, and other diagnostic tools.

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A track record of leading technical direction across team boundaries, including ownership of architectural decisions, technical proposals, and cross-team implementation.

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Experience mentoring senior engineers and helping engineering teams improve their technical capabilities.

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Leadership and working style

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Previous startup experience and comfort working in an environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and evolving processes.

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Ability to balance technical quality and long-term maintainability with delivery speed and business needs.

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A proactive, accountable mindset, with the ability to identify problems and take ownership without depending on established documentation or processes.

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Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build consensus and lead through technical credibility and influence.

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Additional experience that would be an advantage

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Familiarity with interface definition languages or binary serialization formats such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers, particularly schema evolution across many consumers.

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Experience with change data capture tools such as Debezium or PeerDB, and an understanding of PostgreSQL logical replication.

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Knowledge of authentication technologies and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, Keycloak, or Cognito, especially for long-lived connections and machine-to-machine access.

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Experience developing agentic or AI-native developer tools, or designing systems intended to be operated by AI agents.

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Background in chaos engineering, game days, load testing, or fault-injection testing.

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Experience with infrastructure as code and deployment tools such as Argo CD or Terraform.

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Familiarity with observability technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, and PromQL.

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Experience in fintech or another regulated industry, with an understanding of how compliance requirements influence system architecture.

Benefits:

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Competitive salary.

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Stock options.

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Health benefits.

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One-time USD $500 home-office setup allowance for new hires.

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USD $150 monthly stipend provided through a Brex Card.

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Opportunity to work with a globally distributed team of engineers and industry professionals.

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A collaborative engineering environment that values curiosity, empathy, accountability, and open-source contributions.