Principal Backend Engineer (Golang)

About the Role Pragmatike is recruiting on behalf of a European deep-tech company building a decentralized, energy-efficient alternative to traditional cloud providers. Their platform operates on distributed bare-metal infrastructure with advanced automation, delivering sovereign, high-performance compute for modern workloads. We are seeking a Senior / Lead Backend Engineer (Staff-level mindset) with strong expertise in Go and production-grade peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. This is a highly technical role focused on distributed systems, system-level programming, and performance-critical backend services. You will play a key role in designing and evolving the backend foundations of a decentralized cloud platform, working closely with infrastructure, product, and DevOps teams. Autonomy, ownership, and strong architectural judgment are essential. Your Responsibilities - Design and develop scalable, distributed, server-side applications and microservices using Go. - Build and optimize mission-critical backend software, with a strong focus on system programming, concurrency, and performance tuning. - Design and implement robust peer-to-peer (P2P) communication systems (P2P experience is mandatory). - Contribute to or build systems using libp2p or similar P2P frameworks. - Ensure cross-platform compatibility and consistent application behavior across environments. - Collaborate within an Agile/Scrum team, contributing to backlog refinement, risk identification, and dependency management. - Produce clean, maintainable, and reusable code, following strong engineering standards. - Optimize backend systems for performance, reliability, security, and fault tolerance. - Establish and enhance backend infrastructure, including deployment pipelines, observability, and monitoring tooling. - Work across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and collaborate closely with infrastructure teams. - Participate actively in the full application lifecycle, from design to production operations. - Engage with product and design teams to deeply understand end-user and platform requirements. - Conduct thorough code reviews, mentor other engineers, and raise overall backend engineering quality. - Champion best engineering practices and a culture of high-quality software craftsmanship.