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Zürich, Zürich, Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera/Svizra
Onsite
Not Available
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer – Platform based in Switzerland.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will define the long-term technical vision for a large-scale, event-driven streaming platform that powers real-time financial services. You will take ownership of the architecture, from the event backbone and shared client libraries to user-facing streaming infrastructure. Working primarily with Go and Redpanda, you will influence engineering standards, guide architectural decisions across teams, and help modernize systems through event-driven design. You will also contribute to authentication, developer experience, quality engineering, and AI-native development initiatives. This is a senior technical leadership role combining strategic direction, hands-on engineering, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship in a globally distributed environment.
Own platform architecture and technical strategy
Define the end-to-end architecture and two-to-three-year roadmap for the event streaming platform, including Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming services.
Lead the transition from batch-based processing to event-driven architectures across the organization, partnering closely with the teams responsible for individual systems.
Establish engineering standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, event replay, idempotency, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.
Build reliable, scalable real-time systems
Design and optimize streaming infrastructure to support high-volume client connections, connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, message ordering, and delivery guarantees.
Anticipate and address complex failure scenarios, particularly during periods of high market volatility.
Own and evolve shared libraries and internal services used by multiple engineering teams.
Influence security and platform-wide engineering
Help shape authentication and authorization architecture, particularly where identity management intersects with streaming subscriptions, long-lived connections, token lifecycles, and multi-tenant isolation.
Contribute to developer experience, quality assurance, and AI-native engineering initiatives, ensuring that platform schemas, contracts, and event streams support agent-driven development workflows.
Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering on chaos testing and resilience exercises, and with QA teams on test tooling and pre-production release gates.
Provide technical leadership and operational ownership
Drive architectural alignment across teams through technical proposals, design reviews, and influence rather than formal authority.
Mentor senior engineers, share expertise, and delegate meaningful technical work that supports the growth of others.
Participate in the platform on-call rotation and act as a technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure.
Manage deployments and contribute hands-on across application code, infrastructure configuration, logs, metrics, and operational troubleshooting.
Professional experience and technical expertise
At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including several years operating systems at significant scale.
Strong production-level expertise in Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention policies, delivery guarantees, and performance under load.
Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale using technologies such as WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), or gRPC streaming, with a solid understanding of fan-out, backpressure, and slow-consumer management.
Proficiency in Go, or deep experience with another strongly typed programming language and the ability to become productive in Go quickly.
Experience building or maintaining shared libraries used across multiple teams, with a practical understanding of API stability, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation.
Solid experience with relational databases, including core database concepts applicable to PostgreSQL.
Infrastructure, security, and operational skills
Strong Kubernetes knowledge beyond the basics, including the ability to write Helm charts and apply security best practices; relevant professional experience or certifications are expected.
Demonstrated expertise in at least one adjacent area: identity and access management, developer tooling and continuous integration, or testing and system resilience.
Experience designing and operating distributed systems, with the ability to investigate production issues using logs, metrics, and other diagnostic tools.
A track record of leading technical direction across team boundaries, including ownership of architectural decisions, technical proposals, and cross-team implementation.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and helping engineering teams improve their technical capabilities.
Leadership and working style
Previous startup experience and comfort working in an environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and evolving processes.
Ability to balance technical quality and long-term maintainability with delivery speed and business needs.
A proactive, accountable mindset, with the ability to identify problems and take ownership without depending on established documentation or processes.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build consensus and lead through technical credibility and influence.
Additional experience that would be an advantage
Familiarity with interface definition languages or binary serialization formats such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers, particularly schema evolution across many consumers.
Experience with change data capture tools such as Debezium or PeerDB, and an understanding of PostgreSQL logical replication.
Knowledge of authentication technologies and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, Keycloak, or Cognito, especially for long-lived connections and machine-to-machine access.
Experience developing agentic or AI-native developer tools, or designing systems intended to be operated by AI agents.
Background in chaos engineering, game days, load testing, or fault-injection testing.
Experience with infrastructure as code and deployment tools such as Argo CD or Terraform.
Familiarity with observability technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, and PromQL.
Experience in fintech or another regulated industry, with an understanding of how compliance requirements influence system architecture.
Competitive salary.
Stock options.
Health benefits.
One-time USD $500 home-office setup allowance for new hires.
USD $150 monthly stipend provided through a Brex Card.
Opportunity to work with a globally distributed team of engineers and industry professionals.
A collaborative engineering environment that values curiosity, empathy, accountability, and open-source contributions.