Location: UK/Remote Europe (GMT)
Department: Engineering
Contract role
About YLD:
Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, Porto.
About the role:As a Distributed Systems Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team designing and building the core foundations of a highly performant, low-latency system. We’re looking for someone who is curious, deeply technical, and comfortable operating close to the metal. You should have strong systems-level thinking, a solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, and an interest in database internals.
In this role, you’ll help design and implement core infrastructure components, build and optimise binary protocols, and work on performance-critical parts of the system. You’ll collaborate closely with the team through ****context engineering workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Agentic Coding), and you’ll bring a pragmatic, quality-driven approach to problem-solving. You’ll be an effective communicator, a strong collaborator, and someone who thrives in fast-moving engineering environments.
About You:- Strong experience with low-level languages (C/C++/Rust preferred)
- Experience with low-level OS interfaces (file I/O, synchronisation, memory mapping)
- Ability to reason about memory: stack vs heap, allocation costs, fragmentation, paging behaviour
- Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, replication, durability, fault tolerance)
- Experience with binary formats and on-disk data layout
- Strong interest in database internals (storage engines, indexing, logging, MVCC, etc.)
- Comfortable with TDD and high-quality engineering practices
- Experienced with agentic coding and context engineering; treats AI tooling as a professional workflow, not a novelty
- Strong problem-solving ability and deep system-level reasoning
- The chance to work with a forward-thinking, ethical, and fun group of people and to develop and grow your skills in a fast-moving business.
- 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
- Technical Interview with our Senior Developers (1h30)
- Meet and discuss with a Client Partner (15/30mins)
- Growing every day
- Including everyone
- Relationships built on honesty and ethics
- Inspiring solutions
- Winning together
We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. We also believe in work-life balance and offer flexible working around our core hours.
Top Skills
What We Do
With offices in London, Lisbon, and Porto, YLD is a product design and software engineering consultancy specialising in customer experience and disruptive technologies. We were among the first adopters of innovative technologies like Node.js, React.js, React Native, Kubernetes, and GraphQL, which are now staples for many businesses. YLD was also an early adopter of Design Systems as a service and founded Design Systems London, a non-profit community focused on design and product. We leave your teams and tech in a better space by curating bespoke teams of cross-functional experts in software engineering, architecture, DevOps, delivery, design, product and data science to work alongside your teams through close collaboration and, where needed, pair programming or technical training. We drive rapid iteration towards key business objectives, vision and chosen metrics, creating a long-standing product culture and delivery capability in each piece of work. We’ve helped companies like Bulb, Uphold, NewDay, GoDaddy, CondeNast, and many others, achieve technical product excellence. As a result, we enable organisations, regardless of industry, to become their most successful by creating and nurturing a culture that embraces experimentation and learning that lasts beyond the partnership. We are committed to the Open Source community, with almost 10,000 contributions across 500 open source projects. Collective contributions result in more robust, innovative and faster solutions, allowing open source communities to review the code and propose improvements that increase security and reliability. We are also actively engaged in numerous engineering and design communities, supporting and organising the likes of ReactJS Girls and Design Systems London with both online and in-person events and conferences
