Staff Backend Engineer

This isn't a maintenance role or a feature factory. At Gradient Labs , you will own systems that matter - from the first architectural decision through to production, scale, and everything that breaks along the way. You'll work on the infrastructure that makes autonomous AI agents actually reliable in the real world. That means building for failure, designing for observability, and shipping with conviction - not waiting for a perfect spec that will never arrive.

• Build the OS for AI Agents - Contribute to a safe, scalable platform that lets us iterate on autonomous agent capabilities faster than anyone else. You are building the infrastructure that makes AI actually work in production.

• Ship Resilient Systems - Design and own systems that hold up under failures, retry storms, and resource starvation - with full observability baked in. Reliability is a baseline, not an aspiration.

• Take Products from 0 → 1 → Scale - Scope something from scratch, make the early architectural calls, and stay responsible for it as it grows. We build with conviction and we see things through.

• Move Fast, Ship Often - Iterate in small increments. Multiple deploys a day. Comfort with ambiguity is not optional - it is the job. The mission moves faster than the roadmap.

• Substantial tenure building production software at a fast-growing company - fintech, AI, consumer tech, or any environment where pace and stakes were both high

• Proven experience owning complex, high-stakes systems end to end - not handing off at merge, but staying accountable through observability, iteration, and scale

• Deep fluency in Go (Golang) and comfort operating across a modern backend stack (PostgreSQL, Temporal, GCP, Kubernetes)

• A product instinct that goes beyond technical elegance - you think from the customer backwards and bring that into every architectural decision

• Senior, Staff, Principal or Distinguished level in practice - someone who has operated with real scope and real accountability

• Genuine excitement for autonomous AI as a platform shift, not a trend - you want to build the infrastructure that makes agents genuinely reliable

• Strong opinions, loosely held - conviction without ego, and always willing to be wrong in pursuit of the right answer

• We’re still at early stages of building out our compensation bandings, whilst we continue to shape this, we’re open to chatting with people who have a range of salary requirements

• Our compensation package has two key components - base salary & meaningful equity

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• 25 days holiday + bank holidays (or bank holiday opt out for 32 days holiday)

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• Flexible working - we have an office in central London and a hybrid working approach. This role is open to London based or remote in the UK folks (ideally you'd be able to come into the office once per week)

• 30 mins Talent Screen with our Founding People & Talent

• 1hr Hiring Manager interview with our CTO, Neal Lathia

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• Take Home Task Deep Dive interview with 2 of our Backend Engineers

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