Platform Engineer – Backend & Reliability in London

Please note that these positions are based in London, the United Kingdom, Berlin, Germany, or Paris, France — relocation support is provided if required.

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe - we operate in 17 countries, serving +4 million customers who trusted us with over 35B in assets. But we’re striving for more. We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default. Within Platform Engineering, 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. We write production Kotlin, ship new capabilities, and hold the reliability bar for the entire platform. 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 BE DOING

• Build core backend systems: Design and implement new backend services and platform components in Kotlin — high-throughput, low-latency, fault-tolerant by design. You are a hands-on engineer who ships production code, not just reviews it.
• 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 — reliability built in, not bolted on.
• Lead load and chaos testing: Design and run load tests, stress tests, and chaos experiments against critical backend services. Translate findings into concrete architectural improvements and engineering standards the broader team adopts.
• Set and enforce backend 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.
• Drive scale and capacity engineering: Model traffic growth, identify performance bottlenecks across the application and data layer, and own the engineering work that keeps systems performant ahead of demand.
• Lead incident response and turn failures into better software: Own post-mortems for critical service failures and ensure findings close real gaps — in architecture, test coverage, observability, or deployment practices.
• Make observability first-class: Define and implement structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting standards for critical backend services — and hold product engineers to them through code review and design collaboration.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience, with deep ownership of production systems at scale. You write code every day and are proud of what you ship.
• Strong programming skills in Go, with experience building infrastructure automation as software rather than scripts.
• Proven experience building resilient, high-throughput distributed systems — you have strong intuitions around backpressure, failure isolation, consistency trade-offs, and what resilient-by-design means in practice.
• Experience with load testing, performance profiling, and capacity planning at scale — you've designed test scenarios, interpreted results, and turned them into architectural decisions.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and distributed data systems in production — you understand message ordering, consumer behaviour, replication, and failure modes at the data layer.
• A track record of raising engineering standards: you've written the best practices doc, run the design review, or built the internal tool that made the right thing the easy thing.
• Production experience with container orchestration and modern infrastructure — you understand how the platform your services run on affects their reliability, and you're comfortable operating in that environment.
• Strong incident command and post-mortem skills — you lead calmly under pressure and convert outages into durable engineering improvements.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2–3 days a week in the office.

WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW

Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable - we’re here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face - closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out! We believe it’s our team’s varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. We’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels respected and has equal opportunity to thrive in their careers. For any questions on DEI during the interview process, reach out to your recruitment partner.