Staff Backend Engineer: Scale, Reliability & Impact

Trading 212; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Trading 212 is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to shape technical direction across teams while staying close to the systems you ship. You will tackle high-consequence backend problems that cross services and domains, emphasizing performance, reliability and data integrity.

The role is not management; it rewards technical judgement, hands-on coding and mentoring of senior engineers as you partner with product leaders on long-term technical investment.

Qualifications

• Impact across multiple teams or product domains.
• 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.
• Track record of improving reliability, scalability, observability or developer effectiveness.
• Ability to influence technical direction through evidence, clarity and trusted execution.
• Clear communication that helps teams act on complex technical decisions.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the judgement 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

Backend systems

Distributed services

System design

Performance tuning

Mentoring engineers

Tools

PostgreSQL

MariaDB

Redis

Kafka

ClickHouse

Elasticsearch

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Trading 212 is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to shape technical direction across teams while staying close to the systems you ship. You will tackle high-consequence backend problems that cross services and domains, emphasizing performance, reliability and data integrity.

The role is not management; it rewards technical judgement, hands-on coding and mentoring of senior engineers as you partner with product leaders on long-term technical investment.