Staff Software Engineer, Golang

Location: Portugal; Albania; Georgia; Greece; Bulgaria; Kosovo; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Armenia; Italy; Spain; Malta; Romania; Ireland; South Africa; Croatia; Serbia; Montenegro Workplace: Remote ABOUT BLOCK LABS Block Labs is a premier technology studio operating at the bleeding edge of Web3, Artificial Intelligence, and iGaming. We don't just ship features; we engineer high-scale, production-grade platforms that power the next generation of digital products. We are a collective of senior engineers, product strategists, and builders who refuse to compromise on architecture. Whether we are designing autonomous multi-agent AI systems, building decentralized financial infrastructure, or architecting high-frequency iGaming platforms, our standard is excellence. We move fast, but we build for the long term. If you are looking to work alongside a team that values deep technical expertise, thoughtful system design, and product ownership, Block Labs is where you belong. THE ROLE We build distributed, transactional backend platforms across crypto, fintech, and real money gaming. High volume, multi tenant, real time. Balances, payments, and player facing decisions depend on them, so correctness is not negotiable and mistakes are visible immediately. The work spans several products and follows business priorities, so what you own will change over time. You will build and own distributed, transactional backend services in Go, as an individual contributor. Ownership has a specific meaning here. You receive an outcome and its constraints, not a decomposed backlog. You identify the decisions nobody has made and gather the context to make them. You define scope and sequencing. You make the architectural and implementation decisions. You implement the system rather than delegating it. Others will contribute to it, and you own the conditions that let them do so without degrading it. You ship it, and you remain responsible for how it behaves in production. Agents are the normal means of production here, not an optional aid. That does not reduce the need for engineering judgement, testing, or operational ownership. It increases how much of each one engineer carries. You will collaborate with product, engineering, infrastructure, and QA throughout, and you will need to be good at it, because nobody will be coordinating it on your behalf. WHAT YOU WILL DO • Convert business outcomes and constraints into scoped, sequenced, shippable work. • Design and implement distributed Go services handling high volume transactional workloads, integrating with payments, providers, and internal platforms. • Make the correctness guarantees explicit and hold them. Balances and transactional behaviour have no margin for approximation. • Run the agentic system that produces the work: context, decomposition, execution, verification. • Set the harness and guardrails others work inside: context, tests, and automated checks that let people contribute to your system without it degrading into debt you inherit. • Operate what you ship. Know its failure modes, watch it, and fix it. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR • Deep proficiency in Go on high volume, transactional systems. Years matter less than what you have personally taken to production. • Strong judgement on multi tenancy, event driven architecture, queues, and the failure modes each brings. Cloud native, and serious about reliability, observability, and security. • A repeatable agentic engineering system you built deliberately. It holds context, decomposes ambiguous work, verifies behaviour rather than diffs, and keeps unverified code out of production. The system matters, not the tools. • Evidence of carrying the whole chain yourself, from incomplete objective to a system you shipped and then owned in production. Having worked on every phase is not the same as having carried one. • Judgement under ambiguity. There is rarely a finished specification, but there are objectives, constraints, and people who know things. Make the reversible calls yourself and escalate the rest. NICE TO HAVE • Background in fintech, real money gaming, or other high traffic consumer products where money is at stake. • Experience with rules engines, real time scoring, or decisioning systems. • Prior experience designing APIs for multi tenant or white label products. WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT • Not a management or tech lead role. There is no team reporting to you and no plan to create one. • Not an architecture or advisory role. You will not set direction for others to implement. • Not a squad role. There is no prioritised backlog and no one assigning you work. • Not a role where you own one layer of somebody else’s implementation, or where someone else owns verification and production readiness on your behalf. • Not a role where agents are an optional productivity aid you reach for occasionally. If what you want is a well defined squad, finished requirements, and shared implementation, this is a role to skip. That is a legitimate way to work and many strong engineers prefer it. It is not this one. What kind of culture can I expect? Mature, mission-driven, and low-ego. We value clarity over noise, outcomes over theatrics, and pace without chaos. If you’re one of the smartest minds in your craft and want to build with other experts, you’ll feel at home here.