Staff Backend Engineer

About Us

Every business needs to know who they’re really working with whether it’s suppliers, investors, partners, or third parties. At Xapien, we’re reinventing how organisations do that, combining speed, scale and accuracy with cutting‑edge AI. Since 2018, we’ve grown from a deep‑tech startup to a global player in AI‑driven due diligence and risk intelligence. 2024 was a landmark year as we closed a $10M Series A, earned recognition in the Chartis RiskTech100® and Everest Group’s Leading 50™, and expanded our products, markets and customer base. 2025 was even bigger: With new regulations, rising compliance pressure and growing reputation risks, organisations everywhere are demanding smarter, faster ways to work and they’re turning to us. Customers worldwide from global law firms and private banks to universities and nonprofits rely on Xapien to turn days of manual research into trusted insights, delivered in minutes. Customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding. Demand accelerating beyond our UK headquarters, across multiple continents with new customers in the Middle East, Asia and Oceania.

Why this is an exciting time to join?

This isn’t just another job role; it’s an opportunity to shape the future of the due diligence industry with a market‑leading product trusted by global organisations. Whether you’re in marketing, communications, sales or finance, you’ll play a critical role in driving growth, building credibility and defining how we connect our product to a rapidly evolving market. We’re scaling fast with more customers, more releases and bigger regulatory and market challenges. Expectations are rising, due diligence now means real‑time insight, delivered efficiently and with impact.

The Role

We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join our engineering team in a high‑impact technical leadership role. You’ll work on our most challenging technical problems, own parts of our platform's architecture, and help shape the technical direction of our backend stack. Our tech stack centres on Go microservices, with Temporal workflows and MongoDB running on Kubernetes in GCP. You’ll work with modern patterns including event‑driven architectures, gRPC and REST APIs, and comprehensive observability with Grafana Cloud. We’re an AI‑native engineering team. We use Claude Code daily and we’re investing heavily in AI‑assisted development as a core part of how we build software. We want engineers who are excited about this and who have ideas about how to push it further: how to decompose work for AI agents, how to maintain quality at higher velocity and how to help an entire team get dramatically more productive with these tools. You’ll take technical ownership of major domains within our platform – whether that’s our Investigations pipeline (web scraping, data provider integrations, LLM‑powered analysis) or our Core App systems (user journeys, features, and configuration). You’ll be a technical authority, establishing patterns that others follow and driving initiatives that span multiple teams.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical direction and architecture for parts of our platform
• Design and build complex backend services and systems that scale
• Drive technical decisions that affect multiple teams
• Establish patterns, standards and best practices that others will follow
• Shape and evolve our AI‑assisted development practices, setting the standards for how the team works effectively with AI tooling
• Use AI tooling to multiply your own output and help the wider team do the same, rethinking how engineering work is planned, decomposed and delegated
• Lead complex technical initiatives from design through implementation
• Identify and address systemic technical challenges across our backend
• Set the standard for high‑quality code, whether written by hand or with AI — knowing when to trust, when to intervene and what good looks like either way
• Mentor engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar
• Balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery
• Influence technology choices and architectural direction
• Collaborate with engineering leadership on technical strategy
• Build new systems and features while improving our existing architecture

Essential Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals – we use Go, but we’re hiring an engineer, not a language specialist. If you’re excellent and haven’t written Go before, that’s fine.
• Proven track record of designing and owning large‑scale systems
• Strong experience with distributed systems, event‑driven architectures or similar complex systems
• Deep understanding of databases, particularly MongoDB or similar NoSQL systems
• Extensive experience with microservices architecture and inter‑service communication
• Expert‑level understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience working with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor or similar) as a core part of your development workflow, with a perspective on how to get the most value from them
• Experience establishing technical standards and patterns across teams
• Strong architectural thinking with the ability to balance trade‑offs
• Track record of mentoring and developing other engineers
• Ability to drive technical initiatives with minimal guidance
• Experience influencing technical direction at an organisational level
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts

Highly Desirable

• Experience with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration systems at scale
• Deep knowledge of event‑streaming platforms like Kafka
• Experience with LLMs and AI integration (particularly for the Investigations team)
• Experience driving AI tooling adoption and practices across an engineering team – establishing shared conventions, measuring impact and helping engineers level up
• Background in SaaS platforms or B2B products at scale
• Expert‑level knowledge of observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, etc.)
• Deep understanding of authorization patterns, security and multi‑tenancy
• Experience with protobuf and gRPC

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Go
• Databases: MongoDB
• Messaging & Orchestration: Temporal, Kafka
• APIs: REST, gRPC, protobuf
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP
• Observability: Grafana stack
• AI/ML: LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini), RAG systems
• Development Tools: Claude Code, AI‑assisted development workflows

What Success Looks Like (In Your First 6 Months)

• Owned and driven a significant technical initiative to completion
• Established new patterns or improved existing ones across teams
• Mentored multiple engineers, visibly raising technical standards
• Contributed to architectural decisions
• Been recognised as a technical authority in your domain
• Made measurable improvements to system reliability, performance or scalability
• Influenced the technical direction of our backend platform
• Helped evolve our AI‑assisted engineering practices, contributing to how the team gets more value from our tooling

Here’s Our Promise to You

We will work with you to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do your best work. You will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme. Private health insurance to keep you in tip‑top condition. Life Insurance – hopefully never needed. Unlimited holidays – uncapped, take the time you need, when you need it. One thousand pounds professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work. We will work with you to help you realise your fullest potential, always.

Compensation Range: £90K - £120K