Staff Backend Engineer

Crest are a Series D consumer fintech with £1.2bn in annual transaction volume and growth that’s not slowing. They’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the architecture of their core payments platform — a service that’s grown organically over six years and now needs the senior IC who can shape its next five.

This is genuinely an architecture role. You’ll set technical direction across roughly forty engineers, own the design of new core platform capabilities, and be the senior voice in the room when the trade-offs get hard. Go, TypeScript, a meaningful amount of Kafka, a thoughtful relationship with the cloud.

The team is small, the engineering culture is unusually high-trust, and the leadership are people you can actually disagree with productively. The CTO came out of Monzo and Stripe. The eng leadership team is technical end-to-end.

You’ll be a fit if: you’ve been Staff-level for a few years, you have genuine payments or financial systems background, and you’ve operated as a senior IC rather than a manager. You write design docs that engineers actually want to read.

Compensation is £180-220k base plus equity that’s worth taking seriously at this stage. London-hybrid, two days in the Shoreditch office.

The lead consultant on this brief is Alex Park. The first conversation is 30 minutes, no expectations.