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Backend Engineer

Build the Go services behind Tantilium Cloud Runner: the APIs, controllers and event pipelines that provision clusters, ship applications and keep them healthy.

Team: EngineeringLocation: Remote / London, UKType: Full-time
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About the role

Behind the dashboard sits a few dozen Go services. Some provision clusters on AWS and GCP. Some reconcile applications into tenant vClusters through Git and Flux. Others collect metrics, open incidents, and run AI agents that can investigate a problem and, with approval, fix it.

We follow a ports-and-adapters layout across every service, use Chi for HTTP, Bun on PostgreSQL for storage and RabbitMQ for events, and talk to Kubernetes through client-go. You'll design new services, improve the ones we have, and help make sure the whole system stays understandable as it grows.

What you'll do

  • Design, build and run backend services and APIs in Go, from first design doc to production
  • Write Kubernetes controllers and integrations that behave well when clusters are slow, flaky or misconfigured
  • Model data in PostgreSQL and design event flows over RabbitMQ that can survive retries and partial failures
  • Instrument what you build with metrics, logs and traces so problems are easy to spot and diagnose
  • Take part in a fair on-call rotation, and help write the blameless reviews that follow an incident
  • Review code, write clear design docs and help set the patterns other engineers follow

What you'll bring

  • Solid experience building backend services in production, ideally in Go. If your background is Java or Kotlin and you're keen to work in Go, we'd still like to talk
  • Good working knowledge of Kubernetes: deployments, services, RBAC and how workloads behave when things go wrong
  • Experience designing REST APIs that other teams depend on
  • Comfort with relational databases, including schema design, migrations and query performance
  • An understanding of distributed systems trade-offs such as idempotency, retries, timeouts and eventual consistency
  • Experience running what you build, with observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana

Nice to have

  • You've written a Kubernetes operator or worked with controller-runtime or client-go
  • Experience with GitOps tools like Flux or Argo CD
  • Infrastructure as code with Terraform
  • Experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ, Kafka or NATS
  • Interest in LLM-based tooling and how to make it safe in production

Don't meet every point on the list? Apply anyway. Job descriptions are a best guess at what the role needs, and we'd rather hear from you than miss out.

What success looks like

  • In your first few weeks, you've shipped a change to production and joined the on-call rotation with support
  • By month three, you own at least one service and you're the person we ask about it
  • You've reduced a class of incidents or toil, and can show the before and after
  • Your design docs are the ones other engineers point to as examples

Who you'll work with

You'll work with the rest of engineering on a shared set of services, and closely with frontend and solutions engineering when customers need something new from the platform.

How we hire

We keep the process short and tell you where you stand at every step.

  1. 1

    Intro call

    30 minutes to talk through the role, your experience and what you want from your next job.

  2. 2

    Technical conversation

    An hour discussing a system you've worked on. We'll dig into how it failed, how you found out, and what you changed.

  3. 3

    System design

    A collaborative session where we design a small service together. There's no single right answer, and we care more about your reasoning than a perfect diagram.

  4. 4

    Practical exercise

    A focused coding exercise in Go or a language you know well, either as a short take-home or live pairing.

  5. 5

    Decision

    We aim to give you an answer within a few working days of your final interview.

What we offer

Working at Tantilium

Remote-first

Work from wherever you do your best work. We hire across time zones and plan our days so you're not on calls at midnight.

Competitive pay and equity

Salary that's fair for the role and your experience, plus equity so you share in what we build together.

Health cover

Comprehensive health benefits for you, with options for your family.

Time off that you actually take

Generous paid holiday on top of public holidays. We'd rather you rest than burn out.

Learning budget

An annual budget for courses, books and conferences, plus support if you want to sit a certification like the CKA.

Good equipment

A laptop and setup that suits how you work, so your tools never get in the way.

Interested in this role?

Applying takes about five minutes: your details, your CV, and a few lines on why this role appeals to you. A real person reads every application.

Apply for Backend Engineer

Tantilium is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of every background, and we don't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need any adjustments during the hiring process, tell us and we'll make them.