Staff Software Engineer — High-Throughput, Low-Latency Systems

Checkout Ltd; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Checkout.com is seeking a Staff Engineer in London to set the technical direction for systems that process payments at very high throughput. You will shape architecture, raise the engineering bar, and drive designs that scale across multiple teams, delivering value incrementally.

The role requires deep technical judgement, ownership, and the ability to break big problems into smaller iterations that have real impact on customers and business outcomes.

Qualifications

• Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems as part of Checkout.com’s payments platform.
• Define and defend non-functional requirements including availability, latency, throughput, durability and recovery objectives.
• Show deep technical judgement with strong ownership and an ability to break large problems into incremental designs.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, defining the service boundaries, data models and integration patterns that let them scale by an order of magnitude
• Design for resilience from first principles - redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency and recovery - so that partial failures never become customer-facing outages
• Set and defend the non-functional requirements that matter: availability targets, latency percentiles, throughput ceilings, data durability and recovery objectives
• Lead the hardest technical decisions end to end, from problem framing and design review through to production rollout, migration and decommissioning of what came before
• Drive operational excellence by improving observability, alerting, capacity planning, load and chaos testing

Job description

Checkout.com is seeking a Staff Engineer in London to set the technical direction for systems that process payments at very high throughput. You will shape architecture, raise the engineering bar, and drive designs that scale across multiple teams, delivering value incrementally.

The role requires deep technical judgement, ownership, and the ability to break big problems into smaller iterations that have real impact on customers and business outcomes.