Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

The Senior Backend Engineer plays a key role in designing and building greenfield customer-facing applications and APIs that sit at the heart of our product offering.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain scalable backend services and RESTful/GraphQL APIs using Python (Django or FastAPI).
• Write clean, well-tested, production-grade code with a focus on reliability and performance.
• Design and implement data models, working with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and cloud-native data services.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated testing, linting and deployment as standard.

Platform & Infrastructure

• Work within a cloud-native environment on Microsoft Azure, contributing to infrastructure decisions and service architecture.
• Contribute to observability, monitoring and alerting for production services.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis when issues arise.

Collaboration & Ownership

• Take ownership of features end-to-end, from technical design through to delivery and iteration.
• Participate actively in code reviews, architectural discussions, and sprint ceremonies.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Significant professional experience (typically 5+ years) in software engineering, with a strong track record of delivering production systems.
• Backend proficiency in Python (Django or FastAPI), with the ability to design and build APIs and services from scratch.
• Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design, query optimisation and migrations.
• Experience with cloud platforms, ideally Microsoft Azure, and familiarity with containerisation (Docker) and CI/CD practices.
• A pragmatic, product-minded approach to engineering – you care about what you are building, not just how.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative, cross-functional team.
• Experience working with AI-assisted development tools and an interest in integrating AI capabilities into products.

Desirable

• Experience with data engineering concepts: ETL/ELT pipelines, data modelling, or working with data platforms (e.g. Databricks, Azure Data Factory).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues (e.g. Kafka, Azure Service Bus) or streaming data.
• Experience working with scientific, geospatial or time-series data.
• Exposure to infrastructure as code (Terraform) or platform engineering practices.
• Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment.

Company Benefits

• Paid Leave- 35 days (inclusive of public holidays)
• Birthday Off
• Volunteering Leave Allowance
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Life Insurance
• Healthcare Cash Plan
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Pension
• Monthly Wellbeing Allowance
• Breakfast, Snacks, Friday lunch & Barista Coffee Machine in the office
• Learning Portal with over 100,000 assets available to support professional development
• Hybrid working set-up (Minimum 3+ days, Farringdon- London)