Staff Backend Engineer — Platform & API Gateway

ESL FACEIT Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

EFG (ESL FACEIT Group) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Backend to join the Central Platform Team. You will own end-to-end projects across teams, building scalable, high-throughput services and shaping the platform's technical direction.

You will work with Envoy-based APIs, Kubernetes, Istio, and a modern AI-enabled development workflow to drive robust, observable systems while balancing quick, pragmatic delivery with architectural integrity.

Qualifications

• Expert in Go with production-grade backend experience.
• Experience with NoSQL and SQL data 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.
• Own and operate API gateway and service mesh interactions (Envoy/Istio).
• Maintain reliability with observability, SLOs, performance and capacity planning.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines and internal tooling; contribute to frontend areas when needed.
• Contribute to technical direction and set patterns for multiple teams.
• Lead incident management with root cause analysis and blameless post-mortems.

Skills

Go backend

NoSQL & SQL

Auth & security

Tools

Envoy

Istio

Kubernetes

CI/CD

React

Next.js

Job description

EFG (ESL FACEIT Group) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Backend to join the Central Platform Team. You will own end-to-end projects across teams, building scalable, high-throughput services and shaping the platform's technical direction.

You will work with Envoy-based APIs, Kubernetes, Istio, and a modern AI-enabled development workflow to drive robust, observable systems while balancing quick, pragmatic delivery with architectural integrity.