About the role
We are building and stabilising mission-critical trading and capital markets platforms handling real-time market data, transactions, portfolio systems, and enterprise integrations.
We are looking for a Lead Golang Platform Engineer who will act as:
- Stabilization anchor
- NFR owner
- Distributed systems authority
- Production escalation point
- Architecture guardrail for the backend team
- This role is not feature-driven.
- It is about production reliability, performance engineering, and platform ownership.
The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:
Platform Stabilisation and Production Ownership:
- Act as L3/L4 escalation for backend/middleware systems.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents.
- Diagnose latency spikes, Kafka consumer lag, DB contention, and memory pressure.
- Reduce firefighting by fixing systemic issues.
- Own post-incident hardening.
Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) Ownership:
Own and enforce:
- Performance benchmarks
- Throughput targets
- High availability standards
Fault tolerance and graceful degradation:
- Backpressure handling
- Resource efficiency
Identify and eliminate risks in:
- Latency
- GC pauses
- Lock contention
- Message ordering issues
- Retry storms
Distributed Systems and Event Architecture:
Design and stabilise systems built on:
- Golang
- PostgreSQL
- Kafka
- Redis
Ensure correctness in:
- Consumer group balancing
- Offset management
- Idempotency design
- Retry strategies
- Dead-letter handling
- Event replay
- Backpressure management
Architect and optimise:
- Event-driven microservices
- High-throughput APIs
- Concurrent workflows
Advanced Data and Real-Time Systems:
- Optimise SQL query performance under load.
- Improve indexing, partitioning, and connection pooling.
- Design Redis caching strategies for low latency.
- Work with OLAP systems (ClickHouse + Grafana).
- Optional exposure to distributed databases (CockroachDB).
Productisation and Rule-Driven Architecture
- Architect configurable, rule-driven workflows.
- Enable admin-driven client workflow customization.
- Implement high-performance in-memory rule evaluation.
- Prevent business logic from becoming hardcoded chaos.
Observability and Release Hygiene:
- Improve logging, tracing, and metrics across services.
- Define actionable dashboards (Prometheus / Grafana).
- Improve release discipline, rollback strategies, and versioning.
- Ensure dev/staging/prod parity.
Vendor Transition and Codebase Ownership:
- Lead structured knowledge transfer from external vendors.
- Take ownership of legacy codebases without destabilising production.
- Identify high-risk components and stabilise incrementally.
- Establish backend engineering standards.
Team Enablement:
- Mentor 3-5-year engineers
- Teach production debugging
- Guide distributed systems thinking
- Raise code quality standards
- Act as technical anchor (not people manager initially)
Requirements:
- 6-8+ years of backend engineering.
- Strong production experience in fintech/trading / transaction-heavy systems.
- Deep expertise in Golang: Concurrency patterns, Context propagation, Runtime behaviour, Memory profiling.
- Strong Kafka production knowledge: Consumer groups, Rebalancing, Offset handling, Lag diagnostics.
- Strong PostgreSQL performance tuning experience.
- Experience handling real production incidents in live systems.
- Proven NFR ownership.
Strongly Preferred:
- Experience in low-latency trading environments.
- Kubernetes production exposure.
- Redis performance optimisation.
- WebSockets / streaming systems.
- Exchange-integrated or regulated systems.
- Vendor-built system takeover experience.
Who This Role Is For:
This role is for someone who:
- Stays calm during production incidents
- Thinks in distributed systems, not endpoints
- Can read messy legacy code and stabilise it
- Understands performance at the runtime level
- Wants to own platform reliability
- If you want to only build features, this role is not for you.
- If you want to own the stability of capital markets infrastructure, it is.