Senior Staff Backend Engineer - Cloud Platform Architect

Toku; Zuid-Holland; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Toku is expanding its European engineering presence, building a scalable cloud communications platform from its Rotterdam base. We seek a Staff Software Engineer who will shape architecture, lead technical direction, and remain hands-on with Go and Node.js to tackle complex backend challenges.

You will design distributed systems, modernise legacy architectures, and drive platform evolution across multiple squads while mentoring others and maintaining high standards for reliability and

Qualifications

• Staff-level engineering experience influencing multiple teams.
• Extensive backend experience with scalable systems.
• Practical Go and Node.js/TypeScript expertise.
• Proven ability to design complex architectures for scalability and maintainability.
• Deep understanding of distributed microservices and resilience.
• Experience modernising legacy systems toward clean architectures.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ).
• Strong API design and service integration skills.
• Cloud engineering in public clouds (AWS preferred, Azure/GCP ok).
• Craft-focused on maintainable software, testing and code quality.
• Experience operating production systems with observability tooling.
• Demonstrated technical leadership without formal authority.
• Own ambiguous problems and drive pragmatic solutions.

Responsibilities

• Architect new systems and define scalable architectural direction.
• Design and evolve distributed microservices handling high API throughput.
• Remain hands-on with production backend software (Go/Node.js).
• Lead legacy modernisation toward scalable, maintainable tech.
• Shape platform evolution for a unified architecture across squads.
• Design event-driven patterns using Kafka, SQS, or RabbitMQ.
• Build scalable APIs and service integrations across teams.
• Operate cloud-native production systems in AWS and modern clouds.
• Improve engineering standards around testing, review, and docs.
• Improve observability and reliability with monitoring and tracing.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers.
• Drive engineering improvements through automation and tooling.

Skills

Staff-level engineering experience

Backend engineering depth

Go & Node.js

Architecture & system design

Distributed systems

Legacy modernisation

Event-driven architecture

APIs & integrations

Cloud engineering

Engineering craft

Production & observability

Technical leadership & influence

Ownership & autonomy

Tools

Kafka

AWS SQS

RabbitMQ

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Terragrunt

CI/CD

GitOps

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Prometheus

Datadog

Job description

Toku is expanding its European engineering presence, building a scalable cloud communications platform from its Rotterdam base. We seek a Staff Software Engineer who will shape architecture, lead technical direction, and remain hands-on with Go and Node.js to tackle complex backend challenges.

You will design distributed systems, modernise legacy architectures, and drive platform evolution across multiple squads while mentoring others and maintaining high standards for reliability and