Principal Backend Engineer

Salary: £63,000 - 103,000 per year

Requirements:

• We are looking for someone with 8+ years of experience building and operating distributed, production-grade backend systems.
• We need proven experience operating at Senior Staff or Principal level, driving architecture across multiple teams or domains.
• We are looking for deep expertise in Java 17+, Spring Boot, and modern backend engineering practices.
• We need strong experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous systems.
• We are looking for experience building systems for high throughput, low latency, and reliability, ideally in fintech or transaction-heavy environments.
• We need strong grounding in system design, data structures, and performance trade-offs.
• We are looking for hands-on experience with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production environments.
• We need proven ability to implement observability, resilience patterns, and CI/CD best practices.
• We are looking for excellent communication skills with the ability to influence and align stakeholders.
• We need a track record of mentoring senior engineers and leading through ambiguity.

Responsibilities:

• We own and drive the architecture behind our most critical platforms, ensuring they scale with the business and unlock new capabilities.
• We design and evolve high-scale, cloud-native systems powering payments and merchant experiences.
• We lead the development of resilient, secure, and compliant services for high-volume transaction processing.
• We shape and drive adoption of modern backend practices including Java 17/21, Spring Boot 3, Kotlin, and clean architecture.
• We architect event-driven systems using Kafka that enable scalable, decoupled domains across teams.
• We define and enforce standards for API-first development, including REST/gRPC, and domain-driven design.
• We set the bar for availability, performance, fault tolerance, and observability across critical systems.
• We partner deeply with Product, Data, and leadership to translate business priorities into scalable technical strategy.
• We lead cross-organisational initiatives that are essential to company growth and market expansion.
• We influence engineering direction through hands-on contribution, design leadership, and mentorship.
• We bring structure to ambiguity across technical, regulatory, and operational domains.

Technologies:

• API
• AWS
• Architect
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Docker
• Support
• Java
• Kafka
• Kotlin
• Kubernetes
• REST
• Spring
• Spring Boot
• gRPC
• microservices
• Backbone
• DDD

More:

We are Teya, building a financial platform for local businesses across Europe to help cafés, restaurants, salons, shops, and entrepreneurs run their businesses with confidence. We move fast, care about quality, and stay close to the detail, combining great performance with genuine hospitality. This Principal Backend Engineer role is part of our Engineering team based in London on a full-time basis. We offer flexible working hours, physical and mental health support through our GymPass partnership, extended maternity and paternity leave, a Cycle-to-Work Scheme, Health and Life Insurance, a Pension Scheme, 25 days of annual leave plus Bank Holidays, daily office snacks, and a friendly, comfortable, informal office environment in Central London. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

last updated 34 week of 2026