Senior Backend Architect - Go

About the role We're looking for a Senior Backend Architect with deep Go expertise to lead the technical direction of our backend platform while remaining 100% hands-on in the code. You'll design and build the systems that serve millions of concurrent users on tight latency budgets, supporting live operations that run 24/7 - and you'll do it side-by-side with the engineers shipping client features. This is not a meeting-room architect role. You'll write production code every day, own services end-to-end, and set the technical bar through what you build. What you'll do • Design and implement core backend services in Go: APIs, real-time systems, data pipelines, and infrastructure that scale to millions of users. • Set the architectural direction for the backend platform — service boundaries, communication patterns (gRPC, REST, event-driven), data models, consistency guarantees, failure modes. • Partner closely with the Flutter client team and other client engineers to define API contracts, SDK ergonomics, and integration patterns. Their developer experience is your responsibility. • Architect and operate the caching layer (Redis) — data modeling, persistence trade-offs, replication and failover, hot-key mitigation, capacity planning. • Own cloud infrastructure decisions across AWS and/or GCP — managed services selection, networking, cost, multi-region considerations. • Lead technical design reviews, write RFCs, and grow the team's technical level through code review, pairing, and reference implementations. • Drive performance, reliability, and cost efficiency: profiling, load testing, capacity planning, and an observability culture (metrics, traces, structured logs). • Own production: participate in the on-call rotation, lead incident postmortems, and turn lessons into systemic improvements. Must-have • 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with 4+ years shipping production Go. • Track record of architecting and operating high-scale, low-latency systems — millions of MAU / >10k RPS class problems. • Deep, production-level Redis experience — data structures, eviction and persistence strategies, clustering, RediSearch or similar, latency tuning under load. • Strong cloud expertise on AWS and/or GCP — compute, networking, managed databases, managed Redis (ElastiCache / MemoryDB / Memorystore), pub/sub, IAM, cost discipline. • Deep grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, partitioning, replication, idempotency, backpressure, graceful degradation. • Strong API design instincts (REST and gRPC) and a history of defining contracts that client teams actually enjoy consuming. • Production experience with Kubernetes. • Hands-on with relational and non-relational data stores and async messaging (Kafka, NATS, or Pub/Sub). • Strong observability discipline — you instrument before you guess. • Clear technical writing and code-review communication.