Staff Backend Engineer: APIs, Gateway & Kubernetes

ESL FACEIT Group - EFG; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

EFG (ESL FACEIT Group) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Backend to join the Central Platform Team. You will own core runtime systems, including an Envoy-based API gateway and high-traffic core services on Kubernetes.

This is an individual-contributor role with ownership of end-to-end projects and influence across teams. You will apply a LEGO bricks mindset to build modular, reusable components, weigh trade-offs, and explain decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Expert in Go with production-grade backend systems experience.
• Deep experience architecting and optimizing NoSQL and SQL stores (MongoDB, Postgres, Redis/Valkey).
• Familiarity with authentication/authorisation and secure-by-design principles.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimise high-throughput distributed services over HTTP REST and gRPC on Kubernetes.
• Own and operate API gateway and service mesh integrations (Envoy/Istio).
• Maintain reliability with observability, SLOs, performance, and capacity planning.

Skills

Go expert

Distributed systems

SQL/NoSQL

Security by design

Tools

Envoy

Istio

Kubernetes

REST/gRPC

Job description

EFG (ESL FACEIT Group) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Backend to join the Central Platform Team. You will own core runtime systems, including an Envoy-based API gateway and high-traffic core services on Kubernetes.

This is an individual-contributor role with ownership of end-to-end projects and influence across teams. You will apply a LEGO bricks mindset to build modular, reusable components, weigh trade-offs, and explain decisions to non-technical stakeholders.