Senior Backend Architect - Go

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Architect with deep Go expertise to lead the technical direction of our backend platform while remaining 100% hands-on in the code. You'll design and build the systems that serve millions of concurrent users on tight latency budgets, supporting live operations that run 24/7 - and you'll do it side-by-side with the engineers shipping client features.

This is not a meeting-room architect role. You'll write production code every day, own services end-to-end, and set the technical bar through what you build.

What you'll do

• Design and implement core backend services in Go: APIs, real-time systems, data pipelines, and infrastructure that scale to millions of users.

• Set the architectural direction for the backend platform — service boundaries, communication patterns (gRPC, REST, event-driven), data models, consistency guarantees, failure modes.

• Partner closely with the Flutter client team and other client engineers to define API contracts, SDK ergonomics, and integration patterns. Their developer experience is your responsibility.

• Architect and operate the caching layer (Redis) — data modeling, persistence trade-offs, replication and failover, hot-key mitigation, capacity planning.

• Own cloud infrastructure decisions across AWS and/or GCP — managed services selection, networking, cost, multi-region considerations.

• Lead technical design reviews, write RFCs, and grow the team's technical level through code review, pairing, and reference implementations.

• Drive performance, reliability, and cost efficiency: profiling, load testing, capacity planning, and an observability culture (metrics, traces, structured logs).

• Own production: participate in the on-call rotation, lead incident postmortems, and turn lessons into systemic improvements.

Must-have

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with 4+ years shipping production Go.

• Track record of architecting and operating high-scale, low-latency systems — millions of MAU / >10k RPS class problems.

• Deep, production-level Redis experience — data structures, eviction and persistence strategies, clustering, RediSearch or similar, latency tuning under load.

• Strong cloud expertise on AWS and/or GCP — compute, networking, managed databases, managed Redis (ElastiCache / MemoryDB / Memorystore), pub/sub, IAM, cost discipline.

• Deep grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, partitioning, replication, idempotency, backpressure, graceful degradation.

• Strong API design instincts (REST and gRPC) and a history of defining contracts that client teams actually enjoy consuming.

• Production experience with Kubernetes.

• Hands-on with relational and non-relational data stores and async messaging (Kafka, NATS, or Pub/Sub).

• Strong observability discipline — you instrument before you guess.

• Clear technical writing and code-review communication.