Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer London

Company Overview: Our client is a rapidly scaling enterprise AI platform operating in the financial services sector. The business builds workflow automation and AI driven systems used by large, regulated financial institutions to streamline complex, data intensive processes. Backed by top tier investors, the company is in a high growth phase and expanding its engineering team to support increasing enterprise adoption.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help design, build, and scale backend systems that underpin an enterprise AI platform used in regulated financial environments. The role focuses on high performance backend services, large scale data processing, and secure system design. You will work closely with machine learning, product, and infrastructure teams to productionise AI workflows, ensure system reliability, and support enterprise grade security and compliance requirements. This is a hands on senior role with influence over technical direction and system architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs
• Build and optimise data pipelines for large, structured financial datasets
• Ensure systems meet security and regulatory standards (SOC 2, GDPR, FCA)
• Collaborate with ML engineers to deploy and integrate machine learning models
• Optimise PostgreSQL schemas and queries for performance and scale
• Implement caching, messaging, and asynchronous processing patterns
• Participate in technical design reviews and support less experienced engineers
• Monitor production systems, troubleshoot issues, and improve reliability
• Contribute to coding standards, documentation, and engineering best practices

Required Experience

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments
• Strong Python expertise and experience with modern frameworks (FastAPI, Flask, Django)
• Advanced PostgreSQL knowledge, including performance tuning and scaling
• Experience with Redis and caching strategies
• Background in asynchronous task processing (Celery or similar)
• Experience with message brokers and event driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, etc.)
• Solid understanding of REST APIs and microservices architectures
• Cloud experience (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP acceptable)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Strong understanding of security best practices and data protection
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Git
• Strong communication skills and experience working cross functionally

Package & Benefits

• Competitive salary plus equity
• Opportunity to work on complex, high impact systems in a regulated environment
• High level of technical ownership and influence
• Fast growing engineering team with clear progression opportunities
• Additional Information

This is a demanding role within a fast moving environment. The client is looking for engineers who are comfortable with ambiguity, evolving requirements, and taking ownership in a scaling organisation.