Senior/Staff Backend Engineer (Ref: 197681)

Senior/Staff Backend Engineer (Go) — Fully Remote Contact: javier.mcnish@forsythbarnes.com | 020 8194 2708 Are you a Staff Backend Engineer who wants to remain hands-on while having a genuine influence on architecture, engineering standards and technical direction?We’re partnering with a high-growth European FinTech building a modern financial platform for SMEs across Europe. The business has scaled to 1,500+ employees and hundreds of thousands of customers, while maintaining a strong product culture and the engineering standards expected of a regulated financial services business.You’ll join a highly experienced, international engineering organisation where you’ll work on high-scale financial systems, solve complex distributed-systems challenges and influence technical direction across multiple teams.This is a role for an engineer who wants to operate beyond a single codebase or squad, shaping architecture, mentoring engineers and solving challenging problems, while still writing production code. What you’ll doOwn the architecture and delivery of highly scalable, resilient backend services primarily written in Go.Solve complex engineering challenges across distributed systems, scalability, performance, reliability and data consistency.Lead significant technical initiatives from initial discovery and system design through to production.Influence architectural decisions across multiple teams and help establish long-term technical direction.Design clear, maintainable service boundaries using Domain-Driven Design principles.Work closely with Product, Engineering and Platform teams to translate business problems into pragmatic technical solutions.Raise engineering standards across testing, code quality, observability, documentation and operational readiness.Identify and drive improvements to system reliability, developer experience and engineering processes.Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance across the wider engineering organisation.Remain hands-on, contributing directly to the design and implementation of production systems. What we’re looking forSignificant experience as a backend/software engineer, with strong commercial experience building production systems in Go.Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed backend systems.Strong understanding of system architecture, scalability, resilience, reliability and performance.Experience leading complex technical initiatives involving multiple teams, services or systems.Strong API and service-design experience, ideally within a microservices or event-driven environment.Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes and modern observability practices.High standards around automated testing, clean code, documentation and constructive code reviews.A pragmatic, product-focused mindset, you understand that great engineering ultimately needs to deliver value to customers.Comfortable influencing technical decisions and communicating with engineers, Product Managers and senior stakeholders.Fluent professional English. Why join?Annual performance bonus and equity participation.Fully remote within agreed European hiring locations.Comprehensive healthcare, including dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants.Generous holiday allowance and a strong focus on sustainable performance.Dedicated learning and development budget.Work alongside experienced engineers solving genuinely complex technical problems.Significant influence over architecture, engineering standards and technical strategy.Opportunity to work on financial products used by hundreds of thousands of businesses across Europe.International, diverse and highly collaborative engineering culture.Access to modern AI-assisted engineering tools and technologies. The opportunityThis is an opportunity to join a profitable, rapidly scaling European FinTech at a point where engineering has a direct influence on the next stage of the company's growth.If you’re a Senior/Staff-level Go engineer who enjoys solving difficult problems, designing systems at scale and influencing how engineering teams operate — while staying close to the code — we’d love to hear from you. Apply now or get in touch for a confidential conversation.