Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer

Location: London, UK (Remote-First)

Salary: Up to £170,000 + 15% Bonus + Equity

About the Company

I'm partnering with one of Europe's fastest-growing AI companies. With around 500 employees, unicorn status, and profitability already achieved, the business is entering an exciting phase of growth, with plans to hire more than 200 people this year.

The company is building advanced AI products used globally, with engineering at the centre of its success. The culture is built around technical excellence, ownership, innovation, and giving senior engineers the opportunity to solve complex technical challenges at scale.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and help shape the future of the company's platform and products.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who enjoys solving complex technical problems, influencing engineering direction, and driving architectural decisions without direct people management responsibilities. You'll work closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Infrastructure, and fellow Staff and Principal Engineers to build highly scalable, low-latency distributed systems that power AI products used by customers around the world.

You'll play a key role in setting engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and leading cross-functional technical initiatives that have organisation-wide impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction of large-scale engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Design, build and evolve high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems capable of operating at significant scale.
• Drive architecture across backend services, ensuring systems remain scalable, reliable, resilient and performant.
• Partner with Engineering Managers and Product leaders to align technical strategy with business priorities.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical leader across the wider engineering organisation.

About You

You'll be a highly experienced software engineer with a passion for technical leadership and solving complex engineering challenges at scale.

You'll bring:

• Circa 12–15 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong backend engineering experience using Golang (preferred), or extensive experience with Java or Python.
• Proven experience designing and building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
• Experience leading large cross-team technical initiatives and influencing engineering decisions without formal authority.
• Strong architectural design skills with the ability to balance technical excellence and business outcomes.

Please note: This is a senior individual contributor role and is not a people management position. We're looking for experienced Staff Engineers who want to maximise their technical impact rather than move into Engineering Management.

What's on Offer

• Salary up to £170,000.
• 15% annual bonus.
• Competitive equity package.
• Remote-first working, with London office visits approximately 2–3 times per quarter.
• The opportunity to join a leading AI company during a period of significant growth and influence the technical direction of a world-class engineering organisation.

If you're an experienced Staff Engineer with a background in building high-performance backend systems and want to shape the architecture of products used at global scale, we'd love to speak with you.