Software Engineer (Mid-Level) — Distributed Systems

Location: London (Hybrid — 2 days per month in-office)

Compensation: Up to £100,000 + Benefits

Company Scale: Established 8 Years Ago | Highly Profitable | AI Unicorn Scale-Up (500+ Employees)

The Challenge

We are partnering with a highly profitable, globally recognized AI unicorn established 8 years ago to find a brilliant Mid-Level Software Engineer ready to build technology at an extreme scale.

This isn't a standard CRUD-app engineering role. Our core infrastructure operates at the absolute limits of software engineering, handling close to 1 million transactions per minute with a strict 100ms latency envelope. If you are a mid-level engineer who feels capped by standard web scale and wants to master true distributed systems, this is the ultimate environment to level up.

The Team

We strictly hire from the top 2–3% of engineering talent globally. You will work directly alongside world-class, senior distributed systems experts in a high-density, low-bureaucracy environment. This is a high-performance team that values autonomy, technical curiosity, and mentorship over hierarchy.

What You’ll Do

• Build for Extreme Scale: Contribute to the design, development, and scaling of reliable, high-throughput backend services and APIs.
• Own Production Services: Move past simply fixing bugs—you will take ownership of features from whiteboard system design all the way through to global production.
• Optimize Performance: Dive into complex systems to profile code, optimize databases, and help maintain our hard 100ms latency bounds.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with elite product and engineering teams to translate ambitious product ideas into robust, distributed infrastructure.

What We’re Looking For

• 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, supported by a solid degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• Strong Backend Foundations: Proficient in Golang (or another high-performance language like Rust, C++, or Java) with an interest in concurrency and asynchronous programming.
• Event Streaming & Data Pipelines: Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar high-throughput messaging/event-streaming tools to handle massive data flows.
• Distributed Systems Exposure: A strong conceptual understanding of distributed systems trade-offs (e.g., caching strategies, data consistency, network partitions, or microservices architecture).
• Modern Tech Stack: Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), and high-throughput databases.

What’s on Offer

• Base salary up to £100,000, plus bonus and VSOP's
• Ultimate flexibility: Only 2 days per month required in the London office, with the freedom to attend more frequently if you prefer.
• Hyper-growth trajectory: The chance to put a highly profitable, globally respected AI unicorn on your CV while operating at a scale few engineers ever touch in their careers.