Senior Backend Engineer - Retail

Job title : Senior Backend Engineer - Retail

Role Overview

• As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our distributed systems — and you will help define what we invest in each quarter.
• You will sit at the intersection of infrastructure, architecture, and technical strategy, with the reach to shape how every squad at Kuda ships software.

Responsibilities

• Ecosystem architecture: Build shared platform services, internal SDKs, and developer tooling that other teams adopt — your output multiplies squad output, not just your own.
• Quarterly initiative definition: Partner with engineering leadership, product, and finance to identify, scope, and prioritise platform investments with clear business outcomes (uptime = revenue, deploy frequency = faster GTM).
• Event-driven infrastructure: Own Kafka clusters end-to-end — topic design, partition strategy, consumer lag management, schema evolution, and failure recovery at scale.
• Caching & state layer: Lead Redis patterns across the org: cluster mode, pub/sub, distributed locks, eviction policies, and scripting for low-latency financial workloads.
• Engineering velocity: Drive DORA metrics practice — deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR — turning data into quarterly engineering decisions, not just dashboards.
• Platform standards: Define and enforce observability, alerting, service mesh, and on-call standards across all squads. Write the RFCs and ADRs the org builds from.
• Build vs. buy decisions: Lead the evaluation of open-source tooling vs. custom builds — with a track record of getting both right.
• Fintech compliance: Embed audit trails, data residency, and PCI/SOC-aware patterns into platform design from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Mentorship at scale: Grow mid and senior engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and written craft — making knowledge transfer a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering with at least 4 years in a platform, SRE, or infrastructure-focused role — with clear evidence of building systems other teams depended on.
• Deep Kafka experience: partition strategy, consumer group design, exactly-once semantics, and failure recovery in production.
• Redis at scale: cluster mode, pub/sub, eviction policies, and distributed lock patterns.
• Strong proficiency in .NET (C#) and/or Python within high-throughput microservices architectures.
• Experience processing high-volume, low-latency financial transactions with the compliance requirements that come with them.
• DORA fluency: you have used it to drive real engineering improvements and presented those results to leadership.
• A portfolio of internal platforms, SDKs, or shared libraries that other teams adopted — and continued to use after you moved on.
• Fintech, payments, or regulated financial services background — you understand what compliance boundaries mean for infrastructure decisions.