Staff Engineer, Platform

Location: Bristol Office, Hybrid

Reports to: Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

Salary: £90,000 - £95,000

About Us

Duel is a SaaS company on a mission to make Brand Advocacy the industry standard philosophy for building brilliant retail brands. It was founded by world record-breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer. We exist to show that companies built for advocacy can change the world. In today's hyper connected world in which social media is now twice the size of all other media channels combined and entirely user-generated, the most successful brands are the ones investing in people and in community, not in ads.

The Duel Brand Advocacy Solution allows enterprise brands to do just that. We have onboarded over 60 influential brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Charlotte Tilbury, Spanx, Victoria's Secret, LUSH and Elemis. The Duel team's global presence includes offices in New York City & London.

Our team of 60+ is composed of psychologists, brand experts and community builders, combining cutting-edge brand expertise with seasoned SaaS experience.

Backed by top VCs, Duel recently announced a $16 million Series A, which will accelerate growth in the US from our base in New York, and bring our entirely AI-driven product vision to life to equip brands with the solution needed to drive growth through thousands of advocates, customers, creators and brand ambassadors.

The Role

Duel is all on enterprise. We're onboarding Fortune 500 brands, the kind of brands that change the scale of everything underneath them. Our platform needs to match that ambition, and the platform engeering team owns that responsibility: the backend services, the infrastructure, the queue based pipelines, the operational integrity of the whole thing. This role puts you at the centre of that team, hands in the code, hands on the infrastructure, leading the engineers who keep it all running and making sure the platform evolves as fast as the business does.

This is a staff level engineering role. Your time will be split across hands on delivery, technical leadership and mentoring senior engineers, though in practice the balance shifts week to week depending on what needs shipping and what needs fixing. You'll be writing code in a Node.js/TypeScript codebase that's been continuously evolving. Some of it is modern. Some of it carries a decade of decisions. You'll need a real grasp on the conventions of how Node.js is and has been written, because understanding the history of the code is as important as shaping its future.

If you've spent time in enterprise systems, platforms or environments where the code matters and the delivery stakes are high, you'll feel right at home.

We're Looking for Someone Who Will…

• Proactively deliver in a Node.js/TypeScript codebase across multiple services, not just oversee others doing it.

• As a team we take full ownership of the platform — the queues, the database, the infrastructure, the pipelines. As the Staff Engineer you’ll be the technical lead across these areas, working hands-on alongside the team:

  • Queue based processing systems (BullMQ/Redis) handling social media scraping and ingestion, maintaining 99%+ success rates across Instagram and TikTok where reliability and throughput are non-negotiable

  • MongoDB at production scale - schema design, index strategy, query optimisation and migration planning

  • The full AWS infrastructure: ECS services, networking, IAM and cost management, maintained and extended through Terraform

  • CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategy and rollback procedures

• Lead P1 incident response: coordinate responders, drive root cause analysis, write clear post mortems and make sure the same thing doesn't happen twice.

• Contribute to and implement operational standards including runbooks, alerting thresholds and SLAs/SLOs, working with the Engineering Manager to define what good looks like as Duel moves into enterprise territory

• Use Datadog as the primary observability platform: dashboards, log based metrics, alerting and APM traces for production diagnosis.

• Run load testing and performance engineering to find bottlenecks before they become incidents.

• Reason about trade offs across queues, databases, APIs and infrastructure as a connected system, not isolated components. Design for throughput, backpressure, failure modes and recovery.

• Make architectural decisions that hold up under load and remain maintainable by the team, balancing what needs to be modernised against what needs to be left alone.

• Translate ambiguous business needs into actionable technical plans and surface concerns about unrealistic timelines with clear reasoning and alternatives, working with the Engineering Manager to align on the right path forward.

• Manage the tension between what Product wants to ship and what the platform can actually support. Communicate constraints to non technical stakeholders without hiding behind jargon.

• Mentor engineers through complex problem solving and system design. Create accountability without micromanagement.

• Lead on technical scoping and estimation, contributing directly to cycle planning alongside the Engineering Manager. Provide clear input on cross functional dependencies with Product, Frontend and Data to inform sequencing decisions.

• Integrate AI tooling into the engineering workflow: code generation, review, testing and documentation. Understand where it adds genuine value and where it introduces risk.

• Mentor the team on effective AI usage, building real confidence and good habits.

We'd Love to Hear from You If You Have…

• 6+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with deep, sustained Node.js/TypeScript delivery across your career.

• Experience with enterprise systems, you know how to navigate that without breaking things.

• Experience with load testing and performance engineering - identifying bottlenecks before they become incidents in a production environment

• Production ownership of queue based systems at scale (BullMQ/Redis or equivalent) with genuine understanding of retry strategies, dead letter handling and backpressure.

• Infrastructure and DevOps experience, with ECS, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines and broad AWS familiarity. You've built and maintained this, not just used it.

• Incident command experience in production environments with real commercial consequences. You've led P1 response calmly, coordinated responders and driven root cause analysis.

• MongoDB at production scale: indexing, query optimisation and schema evolution on systems that actually matter.

• Security remediation experience, including coordinating and actioning findings from penetration tests

• Systems design thinking that lets you reason about how queues, databases, APIs and infrastructure interact under load, not just how each one works on its own.

• Strong written communication, runbooks on architecture decision records, incident reports and stakeholder updates should all come naturally.

• Comfortable operating in partially defined systems with evolving constraints. You identify systemic issues, not just symptoms.

• Ability to prioritise under pressure and make defensible calls with incomplete information and competing demands.

• Practical AI literacy. You've used LLMs in engineering workflows and you have an informed view on where they help, where they don't and how to bring a team along.

The Person

• You are pragmatic above everything. You take the right risks, not reckless ones. You know when to move fast and when to slow down. You know when something needs a proper design conversation and when it just needs doing.

• You are comfortable with old code. You've seen it before, you know how to work within it and you make smart decisions about what to modernise and what to leave alone.

• You are confident enough to make technical decisions on the fly, articulate risk clearly and push back when something isn't right. You don't wait to be told what to do.

• You are genuinely engaged with AI. Whether through your current role or personal projects, you are actively exploring what's possible and you bring that curiosity into how you and your team work. If the biggest technological shift of the decade doesn't interest you, this isn't the right place.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with social media platform APIs including rate limits, auth flows and data format instability

• Vendor management across observability, infrastructure and security providers.

• High volume consumer facing platform experience where uptime directly impacts revenue.

The Dueligan Culture

• We're building a remarkable company with remarkable people and a remarkable culture. Advocacy is our north star, for customers and employees.

• A High Trust, Tight Ship, full of Bloody Brilliant & Utterly Lovely People doing their best work together.

• We value trust and freedom above all else, combined with deep ownership, execution, and candor.

• Dueligans are the largest shareholders in Duel. We take ownership seriously.

In-Person and Remote Working Balance

We do much of our best work together in person, which is why we're hiring people within commuting distance of our London, Bristol or New York offices. But we also recognise the value of deep work at home. Our hybrid philosophy gives you freedom and flexibility, you do you, as long as it's not at the expense of others.

Duel Perks and Benefits

• Flexible working hours – if you need to fit around childcare or need to work around your life, we understand.

• Around 32 days of Annual Leave (28 excluding bank holidays and an extended break between Christmas and New Year, when we close the office).

• On-going training where required.

• Options scheme for all full-time employees – it's important to us that everybody owns a part of the company and shares in the benefits of what we build.

• Company MacBook to work from.

• £350 WFH Set-Up.

• Headspace Contributions.

• Personal Development budget and support.

• 2 additional days leave for volunteering.
  

Duel is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees