Realtime Pub/Sub Engineer — Remote-First with Equity

Ably; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Equity EMI

Holiday allowance

Parental leave

Workspace budget

Learning budget

Private healthcare

Mental wellbeing

Wellbeing budget

Life insurance

Cycle to Work

Sabbatical

Job summary

The Pub/Sub team at Ably is hiring a backend engineer to tackle core distributed systems at planet scale, building the infrastructure developers rely on every day. You will deliver platform functionality across Pub/Sub APIs, LiveObjects state sync, and AI Transport, using AI tooling for planning, while owning correctness and architectural quality.

Speed and quality go hand in hand here. We value autonomy, collaboration, and a developer-first mindset in a remote-first, UK-wide team with

Qualifications

• Strong interest in distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure.
• Experience with messaging queues, pub/sub or streaming systems at scale.
• Proficiency in a high-level server-side language (Node.js or Go).
• Ability to self-start, work through ambiguity, and make good decisions with minimal guidance.
• Practical use of AI tooling to accelerate development while applying rigorous engineering standards.
• Collaborative, open mindset with willingness to share work publicly and contribute to the broader developer community.
• Experience in dynamic, early-stage environments where adaptability matters.

Responsibilities

• Deliver key platform functionality across Ably's Pub/Sub APIs, LiveObjects state synchronization, and AI Transport.
• Work fluently with AI tooling for planning, spike work, code generation, and documentation while owning correctness and architectural quality.
• Solve hard distributed systems problems in collaboration with the engineering team.
• Stay aligned with 'Developer First' principles to address developers' needs.
• Push to ship quickly and meaningfully, delivering impact to developers and customers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Large-scale infra

Messaging queues

Pub/Sub systems

Streaming systems

Node.js

Go

Self-start

AI tooling

Open collaboration

Job description

The Pub/Sub team at Ably is hiring a backend engineer to tackle core distributed systems at planet scale, building the infrastructure developers rely on every day. You will deliver platform functionality across Pub/Sub APIs, LiveObjects state sync, and AI Transport, using AI tooling for planning, while owning correctness and architectural quality.

Speed and quality go hand in hand here. We value autonomy, collaboration, and a developer-first mindset in a remote-first, UK-wide team with