Staff Backend Engineer: Architecture & Systems Leader

Trading-21; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Trading-21 is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to shape technical direction across teams while staying close to the systems and code. You will tackle problems whose consequences extend beyond a single service or delivery cycle.

This role does not involve people management; your leverage comes from technical judgement, credible execution and helping other engineers make better decisions as you mentor senior staff and influence architecture decisions across domains.

Qualifications

• Evidence of technical impact across multiple teams or a substantial product domain.
• Deep ownership of distributed backend systems operating at meaningful scale.
• Strong judgement in service boundaries, asynchronous communication, data ownership, consistency and failure modes.
• Deep knowledge of relational databases, transactions, concurrency and high-performance design.
• A track record of improving reliability, scalability, observability or developer effectiveness through durable mechanisms.
• The ability to influence technical direction through evidence, clarity and trusted execution rather than title.
• Clear communication that helps teams act on complex technical decisions.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the judgement to choose when to standardise, simplify or leave a system alone.

Responsibilities

• Own high-consequence backend problems that span services, teams or product domains.
• Establish clear system boundaries and architectural direction without creating unnecessary central control.
• Lead technical decisions by making constraints, alternatives, risks and trade-offs explicit.
• Improve performance, resilience, data integrity, operability and failure handling across production systems.
• Resolve recurring structural problems rather than treating symptoms team by team.
• Remain hands‑on where implementation, diagnosis or prototyping is the fastest way to create clarity.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise review quality and make strong engineering judgement easier to reproduce across teams.
• Partner with engineering and product leaders on sequencing, risk and long‑term technical investment.

Skills

Distributed backend systems

System architecture

High-performance design

Mentoring engineers

Data integrity

Tools

Java 21 (Spring)

Go

Node.js (TypeScript)

PostgreSQL

MariaDB

Redis

Kafka

ClickHouse

Elasticsearch

Docker

Grafana

AWS

Kubernetes

Kibana

Job description

Trading-21 is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to shape technical direction across teams while staying close to the systems and code. You will tackle problems whose consequences extend beyond a single service or delivery cycle.

This role does not involve people management; your leverage comes from technical judgement, credible execution and helping other engineers make better decisions as you mentor senior staff and influence architecture decisions across domains.