Staff Golang Engineer

SoCode Recruitment; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

SoCode Recruitment is partnering with a high-growth tech business to hire a Staff Backend Engineer in London. This hands-on leadership role involves owning architecture, guiding technical direction, and shaping the platform with a focus on distributed systems, microservices, and AI-driven development.

The role emphasizes solving complex backend challenges, mentoring engineers, and setting engineering standards across teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience required.
• Strong backend and distributed systems background.
• Experience leading architecture and technical strategy across teams.
• Familiarity with AI coding tools and AI-assisted development is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and technical direction across major platform areas.
• Design and build complex, scalable backend systems.
• Drive technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Establish engineering patterns and coding standards.
• Lead significant technical initiatives from design through delivery.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical bar, including AI practices.

Skills

Distributed systems experience

Backend engineering

Technical leadership

Staff/Principal level experience

AI tooling interest

Tools

Go

Kubernetes

Docker

MongoDB

Temporal

gRPC

REST

GCP

Job description

London Hybrid, two days per week

No Sponsorship Option Unfortunately

Staff Golang Engineer

£100k–£130k

London Hybrid, two days per week

No Sponsorship Option Unfortunately

I’m working with an exciting, high-growth technology business that’s looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to take a leading role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of their platform.

This is a genuinely hands‑on Staff role. You’ll be solving complex distributed systems problems, owning major technical domains and setting engineering standards across the wider organisation.

The stack:

Go • Kubernetes • GCP • MongoDB • Temporal • gRPC • REST • Event‑driven architecture • Grafana Cloud

AI is a big part of how they engineer. The team uses Claude Code and AI‑assisted development every day, with a real focus on figuring out how engineering teams can use AI to increase velocity without compromising quality. They’re looking for someone who doesn’t just use these tools, but is interested in how they can fundamentally change the way engineering teams work.

Responsibilities:

• Owning architecture and technical direction across major areas of the platform
• Designing and building complex, scalable backend systems
• Driving technical decisions across multiple teams
• Establishing engineering patterns and standards
• Leading significant technical initiatives from design through delivery
• Mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar
• Helping shape the organisation’s AI‑assisted engineering practices

They’re looking for:

• 10+ years software engineering experience
• Strong backend and distributed systems experience
• Significant experience with microservices and event‑driven architectures
• Expert Kubernetes and Docker experience
• Strong database knowledge, ideally MongoDB or similar NoSQL
• Experience operating at Staff/Principal level or equivalent
• Experience influencing architecture and technical strategy across teams
• Experience with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Copilot or Cursor

Go experience is preferred rather than essential. They’re hiring an exceptional backend engineer rather than simply a Go specialist.

Experience with Temporal, Kafka, LLMs, gRPC, observability and SaaS platforms would be particularly interesting.

£100,000–£130,000

If you’re a senior technical leader who still loves getting into the engineering problems yourself, this could be a very interesting one.