Platform Engineer – Backend & Reliability

About the role

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our Backend Reliability team builds and owns Trade Republic's most critical backend systems — the services that process every trade, every payment, every savings plan. This is a software engineering role first: we believe the best reliability work happens at the code level, not the runbook level.

What you'll do

• Design and implement new backend services and platform components in Kotlin — high-throughput, low-latency, fault-tolerant by design.
• Own reliability as a first-class engineering concern: define and drive SLOs, model failure modes during design, implement circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, and retry strategies directly in the application layer.
• Design and run load tests, stress tests, and chaos experiments against critical backend services. Translate findings into concrete architectural improvements and engineering standards.
• Define best practices for service design, error handling, resiliency patterns, and safe deployment — and work directly with engineering teams to raise the bar across the platform.
• Model traffic growth, identify performance bottlenecks across the application and data layer, and own the engineering work that keeps systems performant ahead of demand.
• Own post-mortems for critical service failures and ensure findings close real gaps — in architecture, test coverage, observability, or deployment practices.
• Define and implement structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting standards for critical backend services.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience, with deep ownership of production systems at scale.
• Strong programming skills in Go, with experience building infrastructure automation as software rather than scripts.
• Proven experience building resilient, high-throughput distributed systems — strong intuitions around backpressure, failure isolation, consistency trade-offs.
• Experience with load testing, performance profiling, and capacity planning at scale.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and distributed data systems in production.
• Track record of raising engineering standards through documentation, design reviews, or internal tools.
• Production experience with container orchestration and modern infrastructure.
• Strong incident command and post-mortem skills.

What they offer

• Based in London, Berlin, or Paris with relocation support provided.
• Flexible hybrid setup with 2–3 days a week in the office.