Lead Golang Platform Engineer

We are looking for a Lead Golang Platform Engineer to own the stability, performance, and reliability of mission-critical backend platforms supporting real-time market data, transactions, portfolio systems, and enterprise integrations. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on distributed systems, production incident management, performance optimization, and platform ownership rather than feature development alone.

Responsibilities:

• Own production stability and act as the L3/L4 escalation point for backend and middleware systems.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents, latency spikes, Kafka lag, database contention, and memory issues.
• Drive non-functional requirements (NFRs), including performance, throughput, high availability, fault tolerance, and resource efficiency.
• Design and optimize distributed systems and event-driven microservices using Golang, Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Redis.
• Ensure reliable event processing through idempotency, offset management, retries, dead-letter queues, event replay, and backpressure handling.
• Optimize PostgreSQL queries, indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, and Redis caching for high-performance workloads.
• Build configurable, rule-driven workflows and high-performance backend services.
• Improve observability through logging, tracing, metrics, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Lead vendor knowledge transfer, take ownership of legacy codebases, and establish backend engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers on production debugging, distributed systems, and code quality.

Requirements:

• 6-8+ years of backend engineering experience, preferably in fintech, trading, or transaction-heavy systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Golang, including concurrency, context propagation, runtime behavior, and memory profiling.
• Strong production experience with Apache Kafka, including consumer groups, rebalancing, offset management, and lag diagnostics.
• Proven expertise in PostgreSQL performance tuning and database optimization.
• Experience troubleshooting live production incidents and driving permanent corrective actions.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, fault tolerance, and high-throughput APIs.
• Demonstrated ownership of non-functional requirements (NFRs), performance benchmarks, and production reliability.

Good To Have:

• Experience with low-latency trading platforms, exchanges, or regulated financial systems.
• Production exposure to Kubernetes and Redis performance optimization.
• Experience with WebSockets, streaming systems, ClickHouse, and Grafana.
• Familiarity with CockroachDB or other distributed databases.
• Experience taking over vendor-built or legacy platforms.

Ideal Candidate:

• Someone who can remain calm during critical production incidents, diagnose complex distributed-system issues, optimize runtime performance, and take end-to-end ownership of platform reliability while providing technical guidance to the backend team.

Skills

apache kafka, backend, go, golang, kafka, platform