Senior Backend Engineer

Skills

About the Role

You will help shape the technical direction of a complex, high-stakes system that powers how customers screen, monitor, and act on blockchain risk. You'll work on world-class sanctions reporting, contribute to scaling the platform to serve a rapidly growing customer base, and partner closely with data engineering counterparts to bring unique, customer-specific insights to life. This is a role for you if you want to go deep, can hold the complexity of distributed systems in your head, and take pride in building things that are both correct and fast. Within your first six months, you'll deliver meaningful contributions to the Real-time Risk platform, build confidence across the codebase and event-driven architecture, demonstrate clear technical ownership of an area of the system, and develop a strong understanding of how sanctions screening and continuous monitoring work end-to-end.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js experience, with the ability to write clean, well-tested, production-ready code
• Proven experience working with complex event-driven, streaming, or queue-backed architectures (e.g. Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, or similar) in a production environment
• Solid understanding of distributed systems trade-offs: consistency, availability, latency, and failure modes
• Experience working with NoSQL and caching technologies, with comfort reasoning about data access patterns and performance
• A track record of contributing to technically complex codebases, and the ability to communicate architectural thinking clearly
• AI fluency: actively use AI tools to accelerate work, and can demonstrate how you apply them effectively in engineering contexts
• Experience with Java, Scala, or another multi-threaded, JVM-based language (bonus)
• Familiarity with Redis or similar in-memory data stores, particularly for caching and low-latency reads (bonus)
• Experience with EVM-compatible blockchains or crypto compliance domains (bonus)
• OpenSearch/Elasticsearch experience, particularly around index design and schema migrations (bonus)

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust, high-throughput backend services supporting real-time risk scoring, screening, and continuous monitoring workflows
• Work closely with data engineering teammates to deliver personalised intelligence to customers
• Contribute to world-class sanctions reporting infrastructure that compliance teams and regulators depend on
• Help scale the system to support the growing enterprise customer base, identifying and resolving performance and reliability bottlenecks
• Take ownership of technically complex areas, driving architecture and implementation decisions with sound trade-off reasoning
• Review code, raise the technical quality of the team, and mentor engineers where appropriate
• Collaborate with product, data, and engineering stakeholders to translate compliance requirements into well-designed, maintainable systems

Benefits

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year
• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space
• $1,000 Learning & Development budget
• 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays
• An extra day for your birthday
• Enhanced parental leave: 16 weeks fully-paid leave
• Private Health Insurance (Vitality)
• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support
• Life Assurance: 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries
• Cycle to Work Scheme