Systems Engineer Fintech Remote 90,000130,000 + Equity

F1 drivers used to talk about mechanical sympathy the idea that the best drivers didnt just push the machine, they understood it. Martin Thompson, co-founder and CTO of LMAX, applied that same principle to software. Out of it came the Disruptor, a concurrent programming framework that achieved extraordinary performance not through magic, but through understanding how hardware actually behaves: CPU caches, memory layout, the way a processor wants to move through data. Code written with the machine, not against it.

The Head of Engineering youd be reporting into spent 20 years working at the systems level on the buy-side in London, in some of the most demanding environments going. He knows what mechanical sympathy looks like under real pressure. Hes now applying those same standards to a fintech company tackling a genuinely large, unsolved problem in cross-border payments and building a team around that philosophy.

The team big enough for a significant funding round, small enough to get to know everyone personally. Low-ego, highly capable, and several have made a deliberate move from hedge fund and HFT backgrounds to work on something with real social impact. The stack is Go, top to bottom.

The role

A hybrid of systems and backend engineering youll write production Go, own your systems end-to-end, and work in an environment where observability isnt an afterthought. Infrastructure, code, and business metrics flow through a unified pipeline.

• Top-of-market base with meaningful equity upside at an early stage
• Fully remote within two hours of London
• First-principles thinking actively taught and encouraged, not just expected
• Full health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Large contribution to home office setup
• Unlimited paid time off, parental leave, and periodic team meetups across Europe

What youll be doing

• Building and owning the infrastructure that runs the production payments platform
• Writing production Go this is an engineering role, not a scripting role
• Performance tuning and reliability engineering treating failure as an inevitability, not an edge case
• Instrumenting the stack with logs, traces, and metrics through a unified observability pipeline
• Security analysis across network, OS, and code layers
• Participating in on-call rotas to support the platform operationally

What youll bring

• 5+ years in systems engineering, SRE, or a closely related discipline
• Production-level Go, written to a standard a senior backend engineer would respect
• Strong mechanical sympathy able to reason from first principles about what happens close to the metal
• Solid Kubernetes and OS internals: user/kernel separation, system calls, and beyond
• Host-level networking TCP/IP, iptables, CNI
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or equivalent
• Observability instincts knowing when to reach for logs, traces, or metrics and how to unify them
• Relational database experience is a strong plus

We recognise that individuals are not just checkboxes. If youre intrigued by this opportunity but unsure if its the right fit, feel free to reach out josh@durlstonpartners.com

If this role isnt right for you but you know someone whod be a great fit, we have a market-leading referral scheme in place to thank anyone who refers a candidate who successfully passes probation.