Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer Location: London - Hybrid – 2 days per week onsite Working Pattern: On call shifts Start Day: ASAP Contract Rate: £420 – £460 per day inside IR35 Duration: 6 to 12 months initially Role Overview Our client is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across highly scalable, cloud‑native backend systems. This role suits an experienced engineer who can shape architecture, lead complex initiatives across teams, and mentor engineers while remaining technically deep. Key Responsibilities * Define and drive backend technical strategy and architecture * Design scalable, fault-tolerant, event-driven, and cloud-native systems * Lead multi-team engineering initiatives and complex system designs * Build and optimise Java (Java 17+) backend services using Spring Boot or Micronaut * Design RESTful APIs, messaging systems, and microservices * Own performance, reliability, security, monitoring, and observability * Lead system design sessions, architecture reviews, and technical decision-making * Champion engineering standards, CI/CD, testing, automation, and DevEx * Mentor engineers and collaborate with Product, DevOps, SRE, and Architecture teams * Participate in on-call support as required Skills & Experience Essential * 10–15+ years building large-scale backend systems * Strong Java, Spring Boot (or Micronaut/Quarkus), and JVM expertise * Deep experience with distributed systems, concurrency, and performance engineering * Hands-on experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Pulsar * Strong API design and event-driven architecture experience * Solid SQL/NoSQL, caching, and data modelling knowledge * Azure cloud experience with Docker and Kubernetes Desirable * CI/CD using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or Jenkins * Automated testing frameworks * Observability tools (Dynatrace, ELK, OpenTelemetry) If you have the relevant skills and experience, please do apply promptly to be considered