Staff Backend Software Engineer

🌏 Located remotely (must live in UTC-5 to UTC+2 time zones to apply)

💸 Salary £110,000

👯 Working in the Engineering team

Want to ditch the commute, keep meetings to a minimum, and join a team of talented, experienced, and friendly folks? Do you do your best work when you have the freedom to work flexibly and the autonomy to make your own decisions and try new things?

We are a profitable, independent company with a fully remote team working asynchronously across Europe, Canada, and South America. We’re building high-quality products for our users in the last-mile delivery space and working on solving complex, real-world problems for drivers, courier companies, retailers, and anyone who receives a delivery!

If you’re an experienced Backend Staff Software Engineer who enjoys working closely with product, design, and engineering - and you like tackling complex backend architecture challenges - we think you’ll be right at home here.

Work/life at Spoke

Just a few of the things we offer on top of salary:

• Fully remote

• Flexible working

• Equity options

• Annual company performance bonus

• 32 days of paid holiday

• Enhanced PTO for parental leave

• Annual company events and meet-ups

We also make sure you have the tools, space, and support to do your best work:

• £3,200 every three years for a new laptop

• £500 a year towards new tech or your home office

• £1,000 a year for learning and development

• £1,000 a year for conferences

• £1,000 a year for wellbeing

💫 If you’d like more info about our benefits or to get a better feel for how we work day to day, you can find more in ourPublic Handbookand on ourCareers Page.

What you’ll be doing day to day

As one of a team of three backend engineers, you’ll work across the systems that underpin our products, and focus on reliability, security, and keeping things running smoothly in production.

In practice, that means building and improving backend services, supporting distributed systems, and making sure we have the right observability approach in place, from logging through to alerting, so issues are easier to spot and quicker to resolve.

You’ll take the lead across multiple backend components, whether that’s shaping system design, digging into complex production behaviour, or driving longer-term improvements to workflows, deployments, and platform performance. As the stack evolves, you’ll be part of conversations about new backend and cloud technologies and deciding what’s worth adopting.

What this role isn’t

A few things that are worth knowing up front:

• There are no daily stand-ups or lots of recurring ceremonies. On average, you’ll have one meeting a week, and the rest happens asynchronously.

• You won’t be handed a spec and asked to implement it without question. You’ll work closely with PMs and designers, ask the right questions early, and help shape the technical approach.

• It’s not a people management role. We don’t work in a traditional management structure, so leadership here comes through technical ownership, leading projects, and supporting the team as you go.

• And while we do like moving quickly, we don’t ship to hit an arbitrary deadline. The goal is to build things exceptionally well, stay pragmatic, and avoid creating future problems.

Requirements

The skills and experience we need from you

• Comfortable working with a high level of autonomy, while staying pragmatic, collaborative, and open to feedback

• Experience building and operating large-scale backend systems

• Experience designing and working with distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and service reliability

• Experience with at least one modern backend language such as Go, TypeScript, Java, or Python

• Able to lead complex engineering initiatives and bring technical clarity to ambiguous problems

• A solid foundation in API design, data modelling, and scalable storage strategies

• Experience in diagnosing performance issues and supporting high-availability production systems

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, IaC, and modern deployment tooling

• Good technical judgement, and the ability to communicate decisions clearly and thoughtfully

The technology and tools we build with

• Programming Language: Node/Typescript

• Databases: PostgreSQL, Firestore

• Cloud Provider: Google Cloud

• Monitoring, Observability & Logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, Google Cloud

A bit about us

Back in 2017, we saw an issue with last-mile delivery. Delivery drivers have a complicated and stressful job, and although delivery software existed, it neglected the driver experience. We set out to create the app that puts drivers first.

We were astounded by the response we received. Drivers told us their job was far less stressful, and they got home earlier every day. Within our first year, we had almost 1,000 customers, $100k in ARR, and a team consisting of our two co-founders, Jack and Pol. Now, with a lean team of ~50 talented people, we’ve grown to $25M ARR, helping over 100,000 drivers deliver more than 1.4 billion packages worldwide—about 40 every second!

Our hiring process

Our hiring process for this role has four stages, which usually takes ~three weeks. At every step, you will have the opportunity to ask questions and make sure that we are the right choice for you.

1) Meet our recruiter

You’ll have a video call with our TA Director, Sadie, who will tell you more about Spoke and get to know you, too.

2) Meet the hiring manager

You’ll have a video call with Vitor, our Engineering Manager and the person this role reports to, to discuss your technical skills and experience in more detail.

3) Paid take-home project

At this stage, we will invite you to take part in a paid take-home project that gives you a chance to showcase your skills and a flavor of the types of challenges you’ll be working on here at Spoke.

4) Final call

You’ll have a 30-minute final video call with our Founder and CEO,Jack Underwood, an informal chat, and an opportunity to meet.

🌿 If you need us to make any adjustments to our interview process, or if I can make you more comfortable for our first call, please let me know. Sadie

Highlights

If you’ve got this far, hopefully, you’re getting the right vibe from us! Just click “apply” to upload your resume and tell us a bit more about you, and we will be in touch.

Thanks!