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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Staff Software Engineer - **Company:** Checkout.com - **Location:** London, UK - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), .NET Framework, Code Review, Data Integrity, Relational Databases, Software Design Documents, Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerance, Cloud Services, Software Engineering, Backend, Low Latency, Production Code, Database Replication, Code Restructuring - **Published:** September 28, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=0b04d5811a074c31 ## About the Role * Significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems in production, with a track record of technical leadership across multiple teams * Demonstrable experience designing for high throughput and low latency, and a strong intuition for where systems break under load * Deep understanding of resilience patterns in distributed systems: idempotency, retries and backoff, circuit breaking, queueing and backpressure, consistency and failure modes * Strong proficiency in either .NET or Java, and the ability to write clear, production-ready code that others can maintain * Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures, and with relational and non-relational data stores at scale * Hands-on experience with cloud-based application development (we use AWS & Azure), containers, orchestration and infrastructure as code * Experience owning production systems on call, with a strong sense of ownership for observability, monitoring and incident response * Experience leading complex migrations or re-architectures of live, business-critical systems with no loss of availability or data integrity * Excellent communication skills, able to influence without authority, write clear design documents, and express technical trade-offs to engineering and non-technical audiences alike Nice-to-haves * Experience in payments, financial services or another domain with strict correctness, auditability or regulatory requirements * Experience with multi-region or active-active architectures, including data replication and failover strategies * A history of mentoring engineers into senior and staff-level roles ## Description * Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, defining the service boundaries, data models and integration patterns that let them scale by an order of magnitude * Design for resilience from first principles - redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency and recovery - so that partial failures never become customer-facing outages * Set and defend the non-functional requirements that matter: availability targets, latency percentiles, throughput ceilings, data durability and recovery objectives * Lead the hardest technical decisions end to end, from problem framing and design review through to production rollout, migration and decommissioning of what came before * Drive operational excellence by improving observability, alerting, capacity planning, load and chaos testing, and incident response, and by closing the loop on the root causes you find * Raise the engineering bar across teams through design reviews, code review, pairing and mentorship, growing the senior engineers around you * Partner with product, platform and other engineering teams to sequence delivery, remove blockers and keep multi-team programmes aligned on a single technical direction * Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and refactor-versus-rewrite calls, and communicate the reasoning and trade-offs clearly to both engineers and senior leadership ## Related Videos - [Migrating half a million users to a new payment service provider](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/730-migrating-half-a-million-users-to-a-new-payment-service-provider) - [Developing the Backend with Stefan Lingler, CTO at Shpock](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100360-developing-the-backend-with-stefan-lingler-cto-at-shpock) - [Are Code Reviews Worth It? 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