Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems
Toku
Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems
Toku is seeking a Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems to join their Rotterdam-based European engineering team. This senior individual contributor role involves designing and modernising distributed systems, primarily using Go and Node.js/TypeScript, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and technical leadership. The position offers significant autonomy to shape architecture across multiple squads.
Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems
Toku is seeking a Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems to join their Rotterdam-based European engineering team. This senior individual contributor role involves designing and modernising distributed systems, primarily using Go and Node.js/TypeScript, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and technical leadership. The position offers significant autonomy to shape architecture across multiple squads.
Salary
Core Qualifications
Technical (Must-have)
Soft Skills
Preferred Qualifications
Technical (Nice-to-have)
Key Responsibilities
- Design new systems and services from the ground up, define architectural direction and make pragmatic technical decisions around scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability and long-term evolution.
- Design and evolve distributed systems and microservices capable of handling high volumes of concurrent API requests and communication workloads, considering latency, resilience, fault tolerance, consistency and failure scenarios.
- Remain deeply hands-on in the design, development and improvement of production backend systems, primarily using Go and Node.js/TypeScript.
- Lead the evolution of existing and legacy systems towards modern, scalable and maintainable architectures, balancing long-term technical direction with the realities of operating production software.
- Help shape the longer-term evolution of Toku's technology towards a more unified platform architecture, identifying opportunities to create reusable capabilities, simplify architecture and reduce duplication across products and engineering squads.
- Design and evolve asynchronous and event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka, AWS SQS, RabbitMQ or similar messaging and event-streaming technologies.
- Design scalable APIs, service integrations and communication patterns across internal services, external providers and distributed backend systems.
- Design and operate cloud-native production systems, working within AWS and modern cloud environments to support reliable and scalable services.
- Establish and improve engineering practices around software design, modularity, testing, code review, documentation, maintainability and continuous technical improvement.
- Improve the reliability and operability of production systems through strong monitoring, observability, troubleshooting and performance-engineering practices.
- Influence architecture and engineering decisions across squads, challenge assumptions constructively and help teams solve complex technical problems without relying on formal reporting authority.
- Develop other engineers through technical guidance, design and code reviews, pair programming, workshops and knowledge sharing, helping raise engineering capability across the organisation.
- Identify systemic technical problems, technical debt and inefficient engineering processes, and drive pragmatic improvements through automation, tooling, architecture and stronger engineering practices.