Platform Engineer – Backend & Reliability

Please note that these positions are based in London, the United Kingdom, Berlin, Germany, or Paris, France — relocation support is provided if required. 

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe - we operate in 17 countries, serving +4 million customers who trusted us with over 35B in assets. But we’re striving for more.

We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.

Within Platform Engineering, our Backend Reliability team builds and owns Trade Republic's most critical backend systems — the services that process every trade, every payment, every savings plan. We write production Kotlin, ship new capabilities, and hold the reliability bar for the entire platform. This is a software engineering role first: we believe the best reliability work happens at the code level, not the runbook level.

• Build core backend systems: Design and implement new backend services and platform components in Kotlin — high-throughput, low-latency, fault-tolerant by design. You are a hands-on engineer who ships production code, not just reviews it.
• Own reliability as a first-class engineering concern: Define and drive SLOs, model failure modes during design, implement circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, and retry strategies directly in the application layer — reliability built in, not bolted on.
• Lead load and chaos testing: Design and run load tests, stress tests, and chaos experiments against critical backend services. Translate findings into concrete architectural improvements and engineering standards the broader team adopts.
• Set and enforce backend engineering standards: Define best practices for service design, error handling, resiliency patterns, and safe deployment — and work directly with engineering teams to raise the bar across the platform.
• Drive scale and capacity engineering: Model traffic growth, identify performance bottlenecks across the application and data layer, and own the engineering work that keeps systems performant ahead of demand.
• Lead incident response and turn failures into better software: Own post-mortems for critical service failures and ensure findings close real gaps — in architecture, test coverage, observability, or deployment practices.
• Make observability first-class: Define and implement structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting standards for critical backend services — and hold product engineers to them through code review and design collaboration.

• 5+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience, with deep ownership of production systems at scale. You write code every day and are proud of what you ship.
• Strong programming skills in Go, with experience building infrastructure automation as software rather than scripts.
• Proven experience building resilient, high-throughput distributed systems — you have strong intuitions around backpressure, failure isolation, consistency trade-offs, and what resilient-by-design means in practice.
• Experience with load testing, performance profiling, and capacity planning at scale — you've designed test scenarios, interpreted results, and turned them into architectural decisions.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and distributed data systems in production — you understand message ordering, consumer behaviour, replication, and failure modes at the data layer.
• A track record of raising engineering standards: you've written the best practices doc, run the design review, or built the internal tool that made the right thing the easy thing.
• Production experience with container orchestration and modern infrastructure — you understand how the platform your services run on affects their reliability, and you're comfortable operating in that environment.
• Strong incident command and post-mortem skills — you lead calmly under pressure and convert outages into durable engineering improvements.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2–3 days a week in the office.

Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable - we’re here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face - closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out!