Senior Backend Engineer (Rust)

Job Summary

JOB DESCRIPTION – Senior Backend Engineer (Rust)

Location: Remote, United Kingdom

Division: Host Engineering

Contract Terms: Permanent

THE TEAM

The Host Engineering team builds and operates backend systems that support reliable, scalable product experiences. The team works across product, platform, infrastructure, and operations to improve existing services, modernize core capabilities, and deliver systems that are understandable, maintainable, and dependable in production.

We are looking for engineers who care deeply about how backend systems behave under real-world conditions: how they fail, how they recover, how they scale, and how other engineers can safely extend them over time.

THE JOB

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with strong production Rust experience to design, build, modernize, and operate backend services and platform capabilities. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role for someone who brings strong systems design judgment, excellent debugging ability, and a practical approach to evolving existing systems.

This role is backend-first. You will work primarily on service architecture, APIs, data flows, reliability, observability, deployment quality, and production readiness. You should be comfortable working through ambiguity, decomposing complex problems, making thoughtful trade-offs, and using AI-assisted and agentic coding workflows to move faster while maintaining high engineering standards.

What You Will Be Doing

• Design, build, and operate production backend services using Rust and other strongly engineered backend technologies.
• Own backend components from design through deployment, observability, incident learning, and ongoing maintenance.
• Modernize existing systems incrementally, reducing technical debt while protecting reliability and business continuity.
• Develop clean, maintainable, production-grade code with strong attention to correctness, testability, performance, and operational behavior.
• Debug complex production and pre-production issues across services, data flows, infrastructure, and deployment pipelines.
• Define practical service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and integration patterns that support long-term maintainability.
• Improve reliability, observability, monitoring, alerting, and deployment workflows for backend systems.
• Use AI-assisted and agentic coding tools to accelerate exploration, implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation while remaining accountable for final quality.
• Collaborate with frontend, product, infrastructure, security, and operations partners to deliver complete and reliable product capabilities.
• Evaluate architectural options and communicate trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to code reviews, design reviews, documentation, and engineering practices that raise the quality of the team.
• Identify risks, simplify complex technical problems, and make pragmatic decisions in ambiguous situations.

Required Qualifications

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)

• Production Rust experience is required, including experience shipping, operating, debugging, and maintaining Rust services or systems in a real production environment.
• Strong backend engineering experience building APIs, services, distributed systems, data-intensive systems, or platform capabilities.
• Strong architectural and systems design judgment, including the ability to reason about service boundaries, reliability, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Excellent debugging, problem decomposition, and root-cause analysis skills.
• Experience evolving, refactoring, or modernizing existing systems without unnecessary rewrites.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-grade code and hold a high bar for testing, review, and documentation.
• Operational awareness in production environments, including observability, incident response, deployment safety, performance, and reliability concerns.