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Gradient Labs is building an AI customer operations platform for financial services, enabling autonomous agents to eliminate manual work in customer support and back-office operations. Founded in 2023, the company works with major banking and fintech players and is led by builders from Monzo, Wise, Revolut, and Google.
In this Staff Backend Engineer role, you will own critical systems end-to-end, from architectural decisions through production, scale, and operational resilience. This is not a maintenance role but an opportunity to build the infrastructure that makes autonomous AI agents reliable in the real world.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building the OS for AI agents: contribute to a safe, scalable platform that enables faster iteration on autonomous agent capabilities
- Shipping resilient systems: design and own systems that handle failures, retry storms, and resource starvation with full observability
- Taking products from 0→1→scale: scope new systems from scratch, make early architectural calls, and remain accountable as they grow
- Moving fast and shipping often: iterate in small increments with multiple daily deploys, operating comfortably with ambiguity
You should bring substantial tenure building production software at fast-growing companies (fintech, AI, consumer tech, or similarly high-pace environments). You have proven experience owning complex, high-stakes systems end-to-end, with deep fluency in Go and comfort across modern backend stacks (PostgreSQL, Temporal, GCP, Kubernetes). You think from the customer backwards and bring product instinct into every architectural decision. You operate at Senior, Staff, Principal, or Distinguished level in practice with real scope and accountability. You're genuinely excited about autonomous AI as a platform shift and want to build infrastructure that makes agents genuinely reliable. You hold strong opinions loosely—conviction without ego, always willing to be wrong in pursuit of the right answer.
The company offers competitive base salary plus meaningful equity, private medical and dental insurance, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays (or 32 days with opt-out), team socials and offsites, and flexible working. The London office supports a hybrid approach; this role is open to London-based or UK-remote candidates, ideally able to visit the office once per week.
