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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Staff Backend Engineer - **Company:** Xapien - **Location:** London, UK - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** £90,000.0 - £120,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Application Integration Architecture, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, Databases, Web Scraping, Cursor, Programming Tools, Distributed Systems, Protocol Buffers, MongoDB, NoSQL, OpenAI, Prometheus, Microsoft Copilot, Software Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Claude Code, Grafana, Reliability of Systems, AI Coding Agents, Backend, Agentic-AI, Event Driven Architecture, Build Management, Containerization, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Google Gemini, Restful APIs, Grpc, Docker, Microservices - **Published:** October 10, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/details/5687234983 ## About the Role Essential * 10+ years of professional software engineering experience * Strong backend engineering fundamentals - we use Go, but we're hiring an engineer, not a language specialist. If you're excellent and haven't written Go before, that's fine. * Proven track record of designing and owning large-scale systems * Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or similar complex systems * Deep understanding of databases, particularly MongoDB or similar NoSQL systems * Extensive experience with microservices architecture and inter-service communication * Expert-level understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) * Experience working with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as a core part of your development workflow, with a perspective on how to get the most value from them * Experience establishing technical standards and patterns across teams * Strong architectural thinking with ability to balance trade-offs * Track record of mentoring and developing other engineers * Ability to drive technical initiatives with minimal guidance * Experience influencing technical direction at an organizational level * Excellent communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical concepts Highly Desirable * Experience with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration systems at scale * Deep knowledge of event streaming platforms like Kafka * Experience with LLMs and AI integration (particularly for Investigations team) * Experience driving AI tooling adoption and practices across an engineering team - establishing shared conventions, measuring impact, and helping engineers level up * Background in SaaS platforms or B2B products at scale * Expert-level knowledge of observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, etc.) * Deep understanding of authorization patterns, security, and multi-tenancy * Experience with protobuf and gRPC ## Description We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join our engineering team in a high-impact technical leadership role. You'll work on our most challenging technical problems, own parts of our platform's architecture, and help shape the technical direction of our backend stack. Our tech stack centres on Go microservices, with Temporal workflows and MongoDB running on Kubernetes in GCP. You'll work with modern patterns including event-driven architectures, gRPC and REST APIs, and comprehensive observability with Grafana Cloud. We're an AI-native engineering team. We use Claude Code daily and we're investing heavily in AI-assisted development as a core part of how we build software - not as an experiment, but as a first-class engineering practice. We want engineers who are excited about this and who have ideas about how to push it further: how to decompose work for AI agents, how to maintain quality at higher velocity, and how to help an entire team get dramatically more productive with these tools. You'll take technical ownership of major domains within our platform - whether that's our Investigations pipeline (web scraping, data provider integrations, LLM-powered analysis) or our Core App systems (user journeys, features, and configuration). You'll be a technical authority, establishing patterns that others follow and driving initiatives that span multiple teams. What You'll Do * Own the technical direction and architecture for parts of our platform * Design and build complex backend services and systems that scale * Drive technical decisions that affect multiple teams * Establish patterns, standards, and best practices that others will follow * Shape and evolve our AI-assisted development practices, setting the standards for how the team works effectively with AI tooling * Use AI tooling to multiply your own output and help the wider team do the same, rethinking how engineering work is planned, decomposed, and delegated * Lead complex technical initiatives from design through implementation * Identify and address systemic technical challenges across our backend * Set the standard for high-quality code, whether written by hand or with AI - knowing when to trust, when to intervene, and what good looks like either way * Mentor engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar * Balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery * Influence technology choices and architectural direction * Collaborate with engineering leadership on technical strategy * Build new systems and features while improving our existing architecture, * Databases: MongoDB * Messaging & Orchestration: Temporal, Kafka * APIs: REST, gRPC, protobuf * Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP * Observability: Grafana stack * AI/ML: LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini), RAG systems * Development Tools: Claude Code, AI-assisted development workflows What Success Looks Like In your first 6 months, you will have * Owned and driven a significant technical initiative to completion * Established new patterns or improved existing ones across teams * Mentored multiple engineers, visibly raising technical standards * Contributed to architectural decisions * Been recognized as a technical authority in your domain * Made measurable improvements to system reliability, performance, or scalability * Influenced the technical direction of our backend platform * Helped evolve our AI-assisted engineering practices, contributing to how the team gets more value from our tooling Here's our promise to you: * We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work. * We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme. * Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition.