Lead Engineer

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.

Skills

Go, Golang, Kafka, PostgreSQL