Senior Backend Architect & Tech Lead - Scale Systems

Academic Key; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Socure in London is seeking a Senior Manager- Software Engineering to lead backend architecture and delivery for high-scale systems. You will write code, shape design direction, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, reliable services in a product-driven environment.

The role emphasizes ownership, cross-team collaboration, and hands-on contribution to critical initiatives. Hybrid work in London is offered with strong focus on operational excellence and security best practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of large-scale backend systems in production.
• 3+ years of hands-on technical leadership (as Tech Lead or Manager) with a track record of leading complex, cross-team projects while contributing to code and design.
• 5+ years of experience with Golang (preferred) and/or Java, plus strong computer science fundamentals (data structures, concurrency, distributed systems).

Responsibilities

• Architect and design scalable, resilient, high-performance backend systems and platforms in AWS, prioritizing reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Contribute hands-on to key initiatives—including design reviews, prototyping, coding, performance tuning, and debugging—typically 30% of your time, while mentoring engineers and establishing high standards.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives; drive design forums, establish engineering guardrails, and ensure high-quality delivery via code reviews and automation.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and Platform teams to define project scope, sequence milestones, and proactively de-risk execution for iterative releases.
• Own design of APIs and microservices, including REST and event-driven patterns, and enforce best practices for versioning, contracts, and backward compatibility.
• Advance operational excellence by defining SLOs, improving observability and alerting, hardening on-call procedures and runbooks, and leading incident response and post-mortems.
• Solve complex distributed system challenges (such as throughput, latency, consistency, and data modeling) with pragmatic decision-making and balanced tradeoffs.
• Document architectural decisions, service ownership, and operational runbooks to share knowledge and maintain long-term scalability.
• Foster team growth through clear expectations, actionable feedback, and mentorship; hire, develop, and onboard diverse talent committed to a culture of ownership and collaboration.

Skills

Golang

Java

Distributed systems

AWS

Docker/Kubernetes

API design

Observability

CI/CD

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenSearch

DynamoDB

RDS

S3

ECS

EKS

Lambda

Job description

Socure in London is seeking a Senior Manager- Software Engineering to lead backend architecture and delivery for high-scale systems. You will write code, shape design direction, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, reliable services in a product-driven environment.

The role emphasizes ownership, cross-team collaboration, and hands-on contribution to critical initiatives. Hybrid work in London is offered with strong focus on operational excellence and security best practices.