Backend Engineer

Job Title: Senior Backend Engineer (Media Foundations)

Location: UK (Remote - must overlap at least 3 hours with PST)

Employment Type: Contract

About the Role:

We are seeking an experienced Backend Engineer with a strong background in product engineering at major tech companies. This role is essential for individuals who have actively contributed as product engineers—meaning you have been deeply involved in building and shipping consumer-facing features, not just backend tasks. You will work on distributed systems serving millions of users daily, collaborating closely with product managers, designers, SREs, and cross-functional teams to drive technical and product strategy. The ideal candidate thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and contributes strategically to system architecture, scalability, and user experience.

Responsibilities:

• Own the full product development lifecycle: from technical design and development to testing, experimentation (A/B testing), analysis, and launch.
• Build and scale backend services supporting massive user and media loads with focus on consumer product outcomes.
• Architect and maintain resilient, scalable microservices and distributed systems.
• Design and manage APIs (REST, GraphQL) and middleware to ensure seamless data flow for product features.
• Collaborate cross-functionally, partnering with product and design to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Lead code reviews, participate in architecture discussions, and contribute to team standards and documentation.
• Troubleshoot and optimize systems for high-throughput, low-latency consumer experiences.
• Design maintainable database schemas and data structures (SQL and NoSQL) aligned with product goals.
• Ensure security and data privacy compliance throughout product integrations and deployments.
• Mentor and help grow technical skills within the engineering team.

Requirements:

• Minimum 8+ years of full-time professional experience developing backend distributed systems at scale.
• Proven product engineering experience—actively building, shipping, and owning consumer-facing features and products.
• Strong proficiency in Python and Go for backend development.
• Expertise with microservices architecture, APIs (REST, GraphQL), and high-throughput backend technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached, Postgres).
• Hands-on experience with software engineering best practices: unit/integration/e2e testing, CI/CD, A/B testing, feature flagging, and documentation.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced, remote environment, managing priorities and deadlines.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent hands-on professional experience.

Preferred Experience:

• Product engineering background in consumer tech applications with 10M+ daily active users.
• Experience working in large engineering groups (20+ backend engineers) with multiple teams contributing to a distributed backend.
• Proven ability to influence technical strategy, developer workflows, and mentoring in a collaborative team culture.

What We Offer:

• Impactful role shaping the architecture and product experience of a large-scale consumer platform.
• Collaborative and inclusive remote work culture with top talent.
• Opportunity to work with complex, high-scale distributed systems and cutting-edge product features.