01Owns
Concurrent request handling
Designs goroutine lifecycles so every one started has a clear way to stop, and uses channels, sync primitives or errgroup depending on the shape of the work.
Hire · Backend
Hire Golang Developers
Senior Go engineers who join your team to own network services, workers and command-line tools where latency and resource use matter. Each has fixed a goroutine leak and profiled a hot path with pprof in a paid exercise before we put them forward.
Paid concurrency and profiling exercise
Senior and lead levels only
Fits your services, CI and on-call
On your team
What a Golang developer owns on your team.
02Owns
Cancellation and deadlines
Threads context.Context through every call that does I/O, sets deadlines at the edge and makes sure downstream calls stop when a client disconnects.
03Owns
Latency and memory
Profiles CPU, heap and blocking with pprof, cuts allocations on hot paths and keeps tail latency predictable under load.
04Owns
gRPC and HTTP APIs
Builds services with net/http or gRPC, defines protobuf contracts carefully and handles backpressure and retries between services.
05Owns
Small, static deployables
Produces single static binaries in minimal container images, with build flags and version info baked in at compile time.
Concurrency is the interview
Starting goroutines in Go is trivial; stopping them correctly is not. The engineers worth hiring can tell you how every goroutine in their service ends, what happens to in-flight work on shutdown and how a cancelled request stops its downstream calls. Ask about the last leak they found and how they spotted it.
Listen for context.Context used everywhere I/O happens, errgroup for coordinated fan-out, and a habit of running tests with the race detector switched on.
Vetting
Skills we test before a Golang developer joins.
01Tested
Goroutine discipline
Spots leaks from unbuffered sends nobody reads, uses the race detector routinely and knows when a mutex is simpler than a channel.
02Tested
Error handling
Wraps errors with %w, checks them with errors.Is and errors.As, and returns useful context instead of logging and continuing.
03Tested
Interfaces in Go style
Defines small interfaces where they are consumed, avoids premature abstraction and keeps packages focused.
04Tested
Profiling and benchmarks
Writes testing.B benchmarks, reads pprof flame graphs and checks escape analysis output when allocations matter.
05Tested
Generics with restraint
Uses type parameters where they remove real duplication in containers or helpers, not as a habit.
06Tested
Table-driven tests
Subtests, test helpers, httptest servers and fakes behind interfaces instead of heavy mocking frameworks.
Work sample
How the Golang developer work sample runs.
- 01Step 1
Find the goroutine leak
The candidate is given a worker pool whose goroutine count climbs forever, finds the blocked send and fixes shutdown so everything exits.
- 02Step 2
Propagate cancellation
They add a request deadline to a handler that fans out to three slow dependencies, ensuring all calls stop once the client goes away. Paid at an agreed rate.
- 03Step 3
Speed up a hot path
Using pprof output and a benchmark, they reduce allocations in a JSON-heavy function and show the numbers before and after.
- 04Step 4
Defend a design choice
A short conversation where they explain to a product owner why they picked channels or a mutex in their solution.
Levels
Golang Developers: what changes at each level.
01Level 1
Senior
Owns handlers, workers and packages within your existing service layout and reviews colleagues’ concurrency code.
02Level 2
Lead
Sets package layout, error conventions, observability standards and how services communicate and fail.
03Level 3
Distributed systems engineer
Designs for throughput across many services: queues, sharding, rate limits, consistency trade-offs and capacity planning.
From senior to distributed systems
A senior engineer adds steady capacity to services that already have conventions for errors, logging and package layout. If each service looks different, a lead will align them. When your challenge is throughput across many services, with queues, partitioning and failure between them, hire for distributed systems experience.
Other options
When to hire someone other than a Golang developer.
01Consider
CRUD-heavy business apps
If the work is forms, admin screens and business rules rather than throughput, Django gives you more out of the box.
Open register02Consider
A large JVM estate
Where your existing services, libraries and teams are on Spring Boot, a Java developer will integrate faster.
Open register03Consider
JavaScript shared with the front end
If sharing types and people with a web team matters more than raw performance, a Node.js developer fits.
Open registerMeasuring instead of guessing
Go teams are often hired for performance, so we check that candidates measure. The exercise hands them a pprof profile and a benchmark and asks for a faster function with evidence. Someone who rewrites code without looking at the profile first rarely helps a latency problem.
A first month in a Go codebase
Begin with a change that reaches production through your normal pipeline and shows up in your metrics. Next, hand over one service to own, including its dashboards and alerts.
Ask the new engineer to profile that service once under realistic load and share what they find. Even healthy services usually reveal an allocation or lock worth a second look.
FAQ
Questions to resolve before the build.
01When is Go the right language for a service?
Go suits services that hold many concurrent connections, need predictable latency, or must ship as one small binary, such as gateways, workers and infrastructure tools. For admin-heavy business software, a batteries-included framework is usually quicker.
02How do you test a Go developer’s concurrency skills?
With code rather than questions. Candidates fix a real goroutine leak, add context cancellation across fan-out calls and profile an allocation-heavy function with pprof, all in a paid exercise.
03Can a Go engineer join our on-call rotation?
Usually after a handful of production deploys, when your dashboards and runbooks are familiar. Senior Go engineers are used to reading traces and pprof output from production, which makes them useful during incidents.
Works alongside
Roles a Golang developer works best alongside.
01Pair with
DevOps engineers
Go services are often the backbone of infrastructure; pairing helps with Kubernetes probes, autoscaling and tracing.
Open register02Pair with
Cloud engineers
For networking, load balancers and managed queues that sit around high-throughput Go services.
Open register03Pair with
QA engineers
To build load and soak tests that prove latency targets hold before a release.
Open registerProduct delivery
Need the whole product built instead?
Primary sources
References behind this page
Dated official documentation, standards, and research that support the factual claims on this page.
- 01Go documentation: Diagnostics
Official guide to profiling, tracing and debugging Go programs.
- 02Go package context
Standard library reference for deadlines, cancellation and request-scoped values.
How to read this page
Scope, cost and timeline figures are planning guidance until confirmed in a written proposal. Diagrams and screens are illustrations, not client deliverables, and source-code rights and handover follow the signed agreement. See the delivery process and the full disclaimer.
Next decision
Turn the brief into an accepted product scope.
Define outcomes, constraints, evidence, rights and handover before delivery begins.
Commercial rights, repositories, environments, documentation, acceptance and handover remain contract-defined.