This is a role for engineers who are energised by scale and by the hard trade-offs that come with it: latency budgets on the authorisation path, failure domains and blast radius, consistency and idempotency across regions, and the operational reality of running critical infrastructure around the clock.
You will operate as a force multiplier across multiple teams - shaping architecture, raising the engineering bar, and turning ambiguous, business-critical problems into designs that can be delivered incrementally. We're looking for individuals with deep technical judgement, strong ownership, and a pragmatic approach to breaking big problems into smaller iterations that deliver value continuously.
How you'll make an impact
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
Experience and qualifications
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
Additional Information
Bring all of you to work
We create the conditions for high performers to thrive, through real ownership, fewer blockers, and work that makes a difference from day one.
Here, you’ll move fast, take on meaningful challenges, and be recognized for the impact you deliver. It’s a place where ambition gets met with opportunity, and where your growth is in your hands.
We work as one team, and we back each other to succeed. So whatever your background or identity, if you’re ready to grow and make a difference, you’ll be right at home here.
It’s important we set you up for success and make our process as accessible as possible. So let us know in your application, or tell your recruiter directly, if you need anything to make your experience or working environment more comfortable.
Life at Checkout.com http://Checkout.com
We understand that work is just one part of your life. Our hybrid working model offers flexibility, with three days per week in the office to support collaboration and connection.
Curious about what it’s like to be part of our team? Visit our Careers Page https://www.checkout.com/careers to learn more about our culture, open roles, and what drives us.
For a closer look at daily life at Checkout.com http://Checkout.com, follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/checkout/life/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/checkout_com/
