Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer – upto 130k, SC Clearable, London (hybrid) 

An opportunity to join a startup building a secure, production-grade platform, taking real ownership of backend services and the infrastructure they run on.

What you’ll do

• Design, build and own backend services, APIs, microservices and platform components in Go.
• Take services end to end, from system design and implementation through to deployment, observability and production operations.
• Build event-driven systems that are scalable, observable and resilient.
• Develop and improve Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines and Argo/GitOps workflows.
• Work hands-on with container registries, secrets, secure configuration and deployment automation.
• Shape platform architecture, system design, security boundaries and operational models.
• Help deliver core platform capabilities including workload isolation, policy enforcement, auditability and identity-aware communication.
• Partner with product, leadership and engineering to turn ambiguous requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs and communicate them clearly.
• Strengthen monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and production debugging.
• Lift engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, documentation and operational improvements.
• Work autonomously in a startup setting, bringing strong ownership and product thinking.

What we’re looking for

• Senior backend engineering experience, ideally including hands-on Go.
• A track record of owning production services, not just shipping features.
• Experience building APIs, backend services, microservices or distributed systems.
• Strong skills across Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Familiarity with GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets and secure deployment workflows.
• Solid system design fundamentals, particularly around reliability, scalability, observability and failure handling.
• The ability to reason about security boundaries, operational risk and production failure modes.
• Experience debugging across applications, services and infrastructure.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and shaping the technical approach.
• Product-minded judgement: you care about why the platform is being built, not just what needs building.
• A self-driven, ownership-focused way of working.
• Confidence giving and receiving feedback, reviewing designs and helping raise team standards.
• Willingness to work across backend, platform, infrastructure and DevOps.

You don’t need to have done everything on this list. What matters most is strong engineering judgement, ownership, curiosity and the drive to build excellent systems.

Nice to have

• Experience in secure or regulated environments such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure or sovereign cloud.
• Zero-trust architecture, identity-aware systems, policy enforcement or workload isolation.
• Service mesh, network policy, ingress/egress control or secure service-to-service communication.
• Observability tooling covering metrics, logs, traces, alerting and incident response.
• Supply-chain security, e.g. image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artifact verification or admission control.
• Secrets management tools such as Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets or cloud-native secret managers.
• Systems where auditability, traceability and operational evidence are first-class requirements.
• Startup, platform, infrastructure or product engineering environments with broad ownership.

Disclaimer: Any remuneration stated in this advertisement is indicative and will be dependent on the successful candidate’s experience, skills and qualifications. Final remuneration will be agreed with the successful candidate and will be subject to the terms of the contract.