At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead backend engineering, design scalable systems, and shape AI-assisted development practices.
- Company: Join Xapien, a fast-growing AI-driven due diligence company making waves globally.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Why this job: Be at the forefront of AI innovation and influence the future of due diligence.
- Qualifications: 10+ years in software engineering with strong backend fundamentals and experience in complex systems.
- Other info: Dynamic team culture focused on learning, innovation, and impactful contributions.
The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 £ per year.
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.
Our momentum so far includes customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding. Demand is 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 tech 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. You won’t just be executing campaigns, closing deals, or managing numbers, you’ll be influencing strategy, optimising processes, and helping position a brand that’s setting the new standard for trust and transparency. For people who love learning, innovating, and making an impact that matters, now is the moment to be a part of Xapien.
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 — not as an experiment, but as a first-class engineering practice. 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
What We’re Looking For
Essential:
- 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 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 organizational level
- Excellent communication skills with 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 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
Staff Engineer employer: Xapien
Contact Detail:
Xapien Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land Staff Engineer
✨Tip Number 1
Network like a pro! Reach out to people in your industry on LinkedIn or at events. A friendly chat can lead to opportunities that aren’t even advertised yet.
✨Tip Number 2
Prepare for interviews by researching the company and its tech stack. Show them you’re not just another candidate; you’re genuinely interested in what they do and how you can contribute.
✨Tip Number 3
Practice your coding skills and be ready to solve problems on the spot. Use platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to sharpen your abilities, so you can impress during technical interviews.
✨Tip Number 4
Don’t forget to apply through our website! It’s the best way to ensure your application gets seen by the right people. Plus, we love seeing candidates who are proactive about joining us.
We think you need these skills to ace Staff Engineer
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show Your Passion for AI: When you're writing your application, let us see your excitement for AI and how it shapes your work. Mention any experience you have with AI coding assistants or how you've integrated AI into your projects. We love seeing candidates who are as passionate about innovation as we are!
Highlight Your Technical Ownership: Make sure to showcase instances where you've taken ownership of technical projects or systems. We want to know how you've influenced architectural decisions and driven initiatives. This is your chance to demonstrate your leadership skills and technical expertise!
Be Clear and Concise: While we appreciate detail, clarity is key! Make your application easy to read by using straightforward language and clear examples. Avoid jargon unless it's necessary, and focus on what makes you a great fit for the role.
Apply Through Our Website: We encourage you to apply directly through our website. It’s the best way for us to receive your application and ensures you’re considered for the role. Plus, it shows you’re keen on joining our team at Xapien!
How to prepare for a job interview at Xapien
✨Know Your Tech Stack
Familiarise yourself with the tech stack mentioned in the job description, especially Go, MongoDB, and Kubernetes. Be ready to discuss your experience with these technologies and how you've used them in past projects. This shows that you’re not just a fit for the role but also genuinely interested in their work.
✨Showcase Your Problem-Solving Skills
Prepare to discuss specific challenges you've faced in previous roles, particularly around backend systems and distributed architectures. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to structure your answers, highlighting how you approached complex problems and what impact your solutions had.
✨Emphasise AI Integration Experience
Since Xapien is heavily invested in AI-assisted development, be sure to highlight any experience you have with AI coding assistants like Claude Code or Copilot. Discuss how you've integrated these tools into your workflow and the benefits they brought to your projects.
✨Prepare Questions That Matter
Think of insightful questions to ask your interviewers about their engineering practices, team dynamics, and future projects. This not only shows your enthusiasm for the role but also helps you gauge if the company culture aligns with your values and career goals.