Staff Software Engineer
Checkout.com20 hours ago
London, United KingdomStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of scalable, high-throughput distributed systems, including service boundaries, data models, and integration patterns.
- Design resilience through redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency, recovery, and failure-domain isolation.
- Define and uphold availability, latency, throughput, durability, and recovery requirements.
- Lead technical decisions from problem framing and design review through rollout, migration, and legacy-system decommissioning.
- Improve observability, alerting, capacity planning, load testing, chaos testing, incident response, and root-cause remediation.
- Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and mentorship.
- Coordinate with product, platform, and engineering teams to align multi-team delivery around a common technical direction.
- Make and communicate build-versus-buy and refactor-versus-rewrite decisions.
Requirements
- Significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems in production with technical leadership across multiple teams.
- Demonstrated experience designing high-throughput and low-latency systems and identifying failure points under load.
- Deep understanding of distributed-systems resilience patterns, including idempotency, retries, backoff, circuit breaking, queueing, backpressure, consistency, and failure modes.
- Strong proficiency in either .NET or Java and the ability to write maintainable, production-ready code.
- Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures and relational and non-relational data stores at scale.
- Hands-on experience with cloud application development, containers, orchestration, and infrastructure as code, including AWS and Azure.
- Experience owning production systems on call, including observability, monitoring, and incident response.
- Experience leading complex migrations or re-architectures of live, business-critical systems without loss of availability or data integrity.
- Excellent communication skills, including influencing without authority, writing design documents, and communicating technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Preferred experience in payments, financial services, or domains with strict correctness, auditability, or regulatory requirements.
- Preferred experience with multi-region or active-active architectures, data replication, and failover strategies.
- Preferred history of mentoring engineers into senior and staff-level roles.
Benefits
- Hybrid working model with three days per week in the office.
- Inclusive and accessible working environment with accommodations available through the application or recruiter.
- Meaningful work, substantial ownership, growth opportunities, and a collaborative team culture.
About Checkout.com
Checkout.com builds a global payments platform for enterprise merchants, offering card acquiring, payment processing, issuing, and risk/fraud tools across 145+ currencies. It serves ecommerce and digital businesses and earns primarily through transaction and service fees, with direct integrations to schemes like Visa, Mastercard, and Amex. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, the privately held company counts brands such as Spotify, eBay, Uber, Klarna, and Sony among its customers.