Staff Software Engineer - Platform

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer – Platform based in Ireland.**

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will define the long-term technical vision for a large-scale, event-driven streaming platform that powers real-time financial services. You will take ownership of the architecture, from the event backbone and shared client libraries to user-facing streaming infrastructure. Working primarily with Go and Redpanda, you will influence engineering standards, guide architectural decisions across teams, and help modernize systems through event-driven design. You will also contribute to authentication, developer experience, quality engineering, and AI-native development initiatives. This is a senior technical leadership role combining strategic direction, hands-on engineering, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship in a globally distributed environment.

Accountabilities

• **Own platform architecture and technical strategy**

• Define the end-to-end architecture and two-to-three-year roadmap for the event streaming platform, including Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming services.
• Lead the transition from batch-based processing to event-driven architectures across the organization, partnering closely with the teams responsible for individual systems.
• Establish engineering standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, event replay, idempotency, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.
• **Build reliable, scalable real-time systems**

• Design and optimize streaming infrastructure to support high-volume client connections, connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, message ordering, and delivery guarantees.
• Anticipate and address complex failure scenarios, particularly during periods of high market volatility.
• Own and evolve shared libraries and internal services used by multiple engineering teams.
• **Influence security and platform-wide engineering**

• Help shape authentication and authorization architecture, particularly where identity management intersects with streaming subscriptions, long-lived connections, token lifecycles, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Contribute to developer experience, quality assurance, and AI-native engineering initiatives, ensuring that platform schemas, contracts, and event streams support agent-driven development workflows.
• Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering on chaos testing and resilience exercises, and with QA teams on test tooling and pre-production release gates.
• **Provide technical leadership and operational ownership**

• Drive architectural alignment across teams through technical proposals, design reviews, and influence rather than formal authority.
• Mentor senior engineers, share expertise, and delegate meaningful technical work that supports the growth of others.
• Participate in the platform on-call rotation and act as a technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure.
• Manage deployments and contribute hands-on across application code, infrastructure configuration, logs, metrics, and operational troubleshooting.

Requirements:

• **Professional experience and technical expertise**

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including several years operating systems at significant scale.
• Strong production-level expertise in Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention policies, delivery guarantees, and performance under load.
• Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale using technologies such as WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), or gRPC streaming, with a solid understanding of fan-out, backpressure, and slow-consumer management.
• Proficiency in Go, or deep experience with another strongly typed programming language and the ability to become productive in Go quickly.
• Experience building or maintaining shared libraries used across multiple teams, with a practical understanding of API stability, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.
• Solid experience with relational databases, including core database concepts applicable to PostgreSQL.
• **Infrastructure, security, and operational skills**

• Strong Kubernetes knowledge beyond the basics, including the ability to write Helm charts and apply security best practices; relevant professional experience or certifications are expected.
• Demonstrated expertise in at least one adjacent area: identity and access management, developer tooling and continuous integration, or testing and system resilience.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, with the ability to investigate production issues using logs, metrics, and other diagnostic tools.
• A track record of leading technical direction across team boundaries, including ownership of architectural decisions, technical proposals, and cross-team implementation.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and helping engineering teams improve their technical capabilities.
• **Leadership and working style**

• Previous startup experience and comfort working in an environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and evolving processes.
• Ability to balance technical quality and long-term maintainability with delivery speed and business needs.
• A proactive, accountable mindset, with the ability to identify problems and take ownership without depending on established documentation or processes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build consensus and lead through technical credibility and influence.
• **Additional experience that would be an advantage**

• Familiarity with interface definition languages or binary serialization formats such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers, particularly schema evolution across many consumers.
• Experience with change data capture tools such as Debezium or PeerDB, and an understanding of PostgreSQL logical replication.
• Knowledge of authentication technologies and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, Keycloak, or Cognito, especially for long-lived connections and machine-to-machine access.
• Experience developing agentic or AI-native developer tools, or designing systems intended to be operated by AI agents.
• Background in chaos engineering, game days, load testing, or fault-injection testing.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and deployment tools such as Argo CD or Terraform.
• Familiarity with observability technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, and PromQL.
• Experience in fintech or another regulated industry, with an understanding of how compliance requirements influence system architecture.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary.
• Stock options.
• Health benefits.
• One-time **USD $500 home-office setup allowance** for new hires.
• **USD $150 monthly stipend** provided through a Brex Card.
• Opportunity to work with a globally distributed team of engineers and industry professionals.
• A collaborative engineering environment that values curiosity, empathy, accountability, and open-source contributions.