SC-Cleared Backend Engineer: Rust & Scalable Systems

iO Associates; England; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

iO Associates is seeking an early stage engineer to join our scaling engineering team. This role blends strong software skills with an exploratory mindset as we shape the company's architectural foundations and culture.

You'll design and build distributed systems and storage infrastructure in a Rust stack with Python API boundaries, owning architectural decisions to support petabyte-scale data, streaming, and data pipelines while collaborating across teams.

Qualifications

• Experience with Rust and Python at API boundaries.
• Experience with Kafka.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, or PostGIS.
• Experience with gRPC and protobuf.
• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Systems thinking; designing and operating production systems under constraints.
• Strong software craft: clean, well-structured code and healthy code review practices.
• Ability to reason and make architectural decisions under uncertainty.
• Familiarity with LLM / AI-assisted development workflows.
• Collaboration and cross-team communication; ability to work with limited top-down instruction.
• Prior experience with large-scale data infrastructure.

Skills

Rust

Python (API boundaries)

Kafka

PostgreSQL

TimescaleDB

PostGIS

gRPC/protobuf

Kubernetes

Systems thinking

Software craft

Reasoning under uncertainty

LLM/AI-assisted development

Collaboration

Large-scale data infrastructure

Job description

iO Associates is seeking an early stage engineer to join our scaling engineering team. This role blends strong software skills with an exploratory mindset as we shape the company's architectural foundations and culture.

You'll design and build distributed systems and storage infrastructure in a Rust stack with Python API boundaries, owning architectural decisions to support petabyte-scale data, streaming, and data pipelines while collaborating across teams.