Staff Backend Software Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Software Engineer based in Italy. As a Staff Backend Software Engineer, you’ll help build and evolve a mission-critical transaction platform that enables secure cryptocurrency transfers between financial institutions, fintechs, and exchanges worldwide. You’ll tackle complex distributed systems challenges where data integrity, tenant isolation, reliability, and auditability are essential in a regulated environment. Working primarily with Go and PostgreSQL, you’ll shape core architectural decisions, improve platform scalability, and ensure predictable performance as transaction volumes grow. You’ll also help establish effective engineering practices for AI-assisted development, ensuring generated code meets rigorous production standards. In this remote-first, collaborative environment, you’ll partner with product, compliance, and customer-facing teams while mentoring engineers and taking ownership of the systems you deliver. Accountabilities - Design, develop, and maintain core components of a distributed transaction platform. - Build resilient systems that preserve data correctness, tenant isolation, and auditability, including when failures occur. - Improve scalability as transaction volumes and the number of institutions per node increase, maintaining predictable latency and database performance. - Produce clear technical design documents and provide constructive, detailed reviews of architecture proposals and code. - Integrate AI coding agents into daily development workflows and improve specifications, context, and review practices to ensure generated code is safe for production. - Collaborate with product, compliance, and customer-facing teams to translate regulatory obligations and customer needs into reliable software.

- Take end-to-end ownership of production systems, including tracing, alerting, incident response, and post-incident follow-ups. - Mentor other engineers, share technical expertise, and contribute to the team's engineering standards. - Participate in the on-call rotation to support platform reliability and operational continuity. Requirements - Typically 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of delivering complex technical projects end to end and helping other engineers grow. - Strong distributed systems design expertise, including asynchronous processing, failure handling, and systems where correctness takes priority over feature delivery. - Strong Go experience, or substantial production experience with another statically typed backend language such as Java, Kotlin, Rust, or C#, with the ability and motivation to start shipping Go code within the first few weeks. - Deep PostgreSQL knowledge, including schema design, query planning, locking, transaction isolation levels, live database migrations, and multi-tenant data management. - Practical cloud engineering experience with AWS or GCP, including IAM, networking, managed databases, queues, and storage. Ability to read and modify Terraform and troubleshoot production issues using traces and logs. - Daily experience using AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor, including writing specifications, providing context, decomposing tasks, critically reviewing generated code, and understanding where these tools can fail. - Strong written communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions clearly and concisely in a remote environment that relies on documentation and asynchronous collaboration. - Solid security fundamentals for handling sensitive data, including encryption in transit and at rest, key management, data minimization, and least-privilege access.