Lead Platform Engineer - Golang

We are looking for a Lead Golang Platform Engineer who will act as an anchor, NFR owner, distributed systems authority, production escalation point, and architecture guardrail for the backend team. This role is not feature-driven. It is about production reliability, performance engineering, and platform ownership.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Platform Stabilization and Production Ownership:

• Act as L3/L4 escalation for backend/middleware systems.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents.
• Diagnose latency spikes, Kafka consumer lag, DB contention, and memory pressure.
• Reduce firefighting by fixing systemic issues.
• Own post-incident hardening.

Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) Ownership:

• Own and enforce: Performance benchmarks, throughput targets, and high availability standards.
• Fault tolerance and graceful degradation, backpressure handling, and resource efficiency.
• Identify and eliminate risks in latency, GC pauses, lock contention, message ordering issues, and retry storms.

Distributed Systems and Event Architecture:

• Design and stabilize systems built on Golang, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis.
• Ensure correctness in consumer group balancing, offset management, idempotency design, retry strategies, dead-letter handling, event replay, and backpressure management.
• Architect and optimize: Event-driven microservices, high-throughput APIs, PIs, and concurrent workflows.

Advanced Data and Real-Time Systems:

• Optimize SQL query performance under load.
• Improve indexing, partitioning, and connection pooling.
• Design Redis caching strategies for low latency.
• Work with OLAP systems (ClickHouse + Grafana).
• Optional exposure to distributed databases (CockroachDB).

Productization and Rule-Driven Architecture:

• Architect configurable, rule-driven workflows.
• Enable admin-driven client workflow customization.
• Implement high-performance in-memory rule evaluation.
• Prevent business logic from becoming hardcoded chaos.

Observability and Release Hygiene:

• Improve logging, tracing, and metrics across services.
• Define actionable dashboards (Prometheus / Grafana).
• Improve release discipline, rollback strategies, and versioning.
• Ensure dev/staging/prod parity.

Vendor Transition and Codebase Ownership:

• Lead structured knowledge transfer from external vendors.
• Take ownership of legacy codebases without destabilizing production.
• Identify high-risk components and stabilize incrementally.
• Establish backend engineering standards.

Team Enablement:

• Mentor 3-5-year engineers.
• Teach production debugging.
• Guide distributed systems thinking.
• Raise code quality standards.
• Act as a technical anchor (not a people manager initially).

Requirements:

• 6-8+ years of backend engineering.
• Strong production experience in fintech/trading/transaction-heavy systems.
• Deep expertise in Golang: Concurrency patterns, context propagation, runtime behavior, and memory profiling.
• Strong Kafka production knowledge: Consumer groups, rebalancing, offset handling, and lag diagnostics.
• Strong PostgreSQL performance tuning experience.
• Experience handling real production incidents in live systems.
• Proven NFR ownership.

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience in low-latency trading environments.
• Kubernetes production exposure.
• Redis performance optimization.
• WebSockets / streaming systems.
• Exchange-integrated or regulated systems.
• Vendor-built system takeover experience.