Senior Backend Software Engineer

Senior Backend Software Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: Rachel Newman

Compensation: £72,000 - £90,000 / year

Description

What you'll own

• Plan and own delivery of your backend projects end-to-end — design, build, release and production monitoring
• Break ambiguous or large pieces of work into thin, releasable slices, managing dependencies with other teams (e.g. [name specific teams]) to keep delivery unblocked
• Use data and metrics to identify delivery bottlenecks, adjusting scope where needed to protect the outcome
• Connect your technical work to the business outcomes it serves, from pass sales to partner transactions, and challenge requirements that don’t serve the intended outcome
• Build working knowledge of adjacent disciplines so you can spot problems or improvements that cross team boundaries

• Design backend solutions that span multiple services or components, documenting the trade-offs you considered
• Produce code and designs used as the quality reference for others — testable, secure, observable and performant by default
• Define the test strategy for work you lead, treating security, performance and accessibility as design inputs, not afterthoughts
• Unblock colleagues on hard technical problems, including outside your immediate area when needed

• Build observability into every change by default
• Lead diagnosis of complex production issues through to root cause, and lead incident response for the team’s services
• Facilitate post-incident reviews and act on what comes out of them
• Make the case for prioritising technical debt within your domain, backed by data, and improve the reliability of the release pipeline for the systems you own

• Lead technical discussions within the team, build consensus on decisions for the work you own, and represent the team in cross-team discussions — including close collaboration with engineers in the sites and apps teams
• Explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, and work closely with Product on feature development and requirements
• Invite challenge on your own decisions, and change course when the evidence points elsewhere
• Mentor colleagues within the team, building depth so capability doesn’t sit with one person, and give code review feedback that explains the reasoning, raising team standards as you go
• Share knowledge more broadly across the discipline — for example through talks, guilds, or the team’s regular engineering Show and Tell

What you'll bring

• You design backend solutions across multiple services or components, with trade-offs made explicit.
• Your work is used as the quality reference in teams you've been part of — testable, secure, and observable by default.
• You've owned testing, release reliability and monitoring on work you've led.
• You're comfortable working in our stack: Java / Spring Boot, TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes.
• You communicate technical context clearly to engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike.
• You mentor colleagues and raise team standards through code review feedback and knowledge sharing.
• You unblock colleagues on hard technical problems.

• Databases — PostgreSQL and/or DocumentDB: schema design, query optimisation, indexing, data modelling at scale.
• Kafka / event streaming — topic design, consumer group management, ordering guarantees, failure handling.
• Other backend infrastructure — equivalent depth in distributed systems, API design at scale, or platform reliability.

• Experience integrating with third-party APIs or building adaptor layers.
• Some frontend exposure (React, Node).
• Background in travel, e-commerce, or high-throughput consumer platforms.
• Experience with agentic AI workflows or building guardrails and evaluation systems for AI.

• "You build it, you run it" is how you already think.
• You break big problems into thin, releasable slices instinctively.
• You're the person colleagues come to for technical clarity, and you work through problems with them rather than around them.
• You give code review feedback that explains the reasoning, not just the correction.
• You invite challenge on your own decisions and change course when the evidence points elsewhere.

• Prefer clearly scoped tasks — this role involves shaping ambiguous problems before solving them.
• Work best within a single system; this role designs across multiple services and regularly coordinates across teams.
• Want a stable long-range plan — priorities shift and this role moves with them.
• Prefer to hand off once something ships.

Benefits

• Annual Go City Explorer Pass allowance
• Enhanced pension contributions. (5% employer)
• Life assurance: 4x your base salary
• Time off:
  • Annual leave: 25 days + bank holidays
  • Option to buy additional 5 days annual leave per year
  • Upgraded Family Leave
  • 1x Community day. Take a day off to give back to the community
  • Work from Anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year
• Health care cash plan
• Personal Learning Budget & dedicated time for development
• EAP providing access to counselling, finance support, etc.
• Cycle to Work Scheme