Staff Software Engineer – Distributed Systems

At Toku, we create bespoke cloud communications and customer engagement solutions to reimagine customer experiences for enterprises. We provide an end-to-end approach to help businesses overcome the complexity of digital transformation and deliver mission-critical customer experiences through cloud communication solutions. Toku combines local strategic consulting expertise, bespoke technology, regional infrastructure, connectivity, and global reach to serve enterprises operating at scale across APAC and beyond.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a backend-first technical role designing, building and operating the distributed systems that power Toku's communications platform. Successful candidates may join one of several backend engineering squads depending on their technical strengths, experience and current business priorities, contributing to customer-facing platform capabilities, backend services, integrations, and shared engineering infrastructure.

You will work primarily in Go, building scalable distributed systems, backend integrations, cloud-native services and production-critical communication infrastructure. This role places a strong emphasis on backend engineering depth, architecture, distributed systems thinking, production ownership and technical initiative.

As we continue to scale our engineering organisation, we're keen to hear from strong backend engineers across the mid, senior and technical lead and architect levels. We value engineering depth, ownership and systems thinking more than job titles or years of experience.

If you enjoy solving complex backend problems, improving architecture, reasoning about distributed systems and building software that operates reliably at scale, we'd love to hear from you.

What you will be doing

• Backend services & APIs: Design, build and evolve robust backend services and APIs that power Toku's cloud communications platform.
• Distributed systems: Design and develop scalable distributed systems and microservices, making sound architectural decisions around service boundaries, scalability, reliability, latency, fault tolerance and operational simplicity.
• Event-driven platforms: Build and evolve event-driven systems using technologies such as Kafka, AWS SQS, RabbitMQ and similar messaging platforms to support high-volume asynchronous communication workflows.
• Backend integrations: Develop backend integrations connecting Toku's platform with external communication providers, internal platform services and asynchronous workflows.
• Cloud-native engineering: Develop and operate backend services on AWS using modern cloud-native engineering principles.
• Architecture & technical leadership: Contribute to technical direction, challenge existing designs, improve architecture and help evolve backend systems toward simpler, more scalable and maintainable solutions.
• Production ownership: Own backend systems in production, including monitoring, troubleshooting, performance optimisation, reliability improvements, incident investigation and continuous operational improvement.
• Platform evolution: Contribute to the ongoing modernisation of backend services, including increased adoption of Go, event-driven architecture and scalable distributed systems.
• Data & persistence: Design and optimise SQL-based data models, ensuring performance, correctness and scalability. Exposure to NoSQL technologies is advantageous.
• Engineering quality: Write clean, maintainable and well-tested code, and participate actively in design discussions, code reviews and technical decision-making.
• Ownership & initiative: Proactively identify technical debt, recurring engineering problems and opportunities for improvement, driving solutions through to completion while collaborating across multiple engineering squads.

We'd love to hear from you if you have

• Backend engineering: Strong hands-on experience designing, building and operating production backend systems. Engineering depth and ownership are valued more than strict years of experience.
• Go (Golang): Strong practical experience developing production backend services in Go.
• Distributed systems: Experience designing or operating distributed systems, microservices and backend architectures, with an understanding of scalability, latency, resilience, fault tolerance and system trade-offs.
• Event-driven architectures: Practical experience working with technologies such as Kafka, AWS SQS, RabbitMQ or similar messaging and event-streaming platforms.
• APIs & integrations: Experience designing, building and integrating production APIs and backend services.
• Cloud platforms: Strong cloud engineering fundamentals. AWS experience is preferred, although candidates with solid Azure or GCP experience are also encouraged to apply.
• Databases: Strong SQL knowledge including schema design, query optimisation and production data management. Experience with NoSQL technologies such as DynamoDB, Cassandra or Redis is advantageous.
• Production engineering: Experience operating production systems, including monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, performance optimisation and continuous reliability improvements.
• Architecture & ownership: Demonstrated ability to improve existing systems, influence technical direction and proactively solve engineering problems rather than simply delivering assigned tasks.
• Observability: Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog or similar technologies.
• TypeScript (nice to have): Exposure to TypeScript or Node.js backend services is useful, particularly when working with existing services.
• Communications domain (nice to have): Experience within CPaaS, CCaaS, UCaaS, messaging, voice, telephony or communications platforms would be advantageous.
• Location: This role can be based in Bangalore, India (remote), The Netherlands (hybrid), or Europe (remote) supporting globally distributed engineering teams.

Toku has been recognised as a LinkedIn Top Startup and by the Financial Times as one of APAC's Top 500 High Growth Companies. If you're looking to build reliable, scalable distributed systems while making a tangible impact on a growing global platform, we'd love to hear from you.