Key Responsibilities
• Lead the technical design and architecture of backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, balancing scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Own delivery of features end to end — from requirements and design through implementation, code review, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Provide hands-on engineering contribution, writing high-quality, well-tested Python code and setting the standard for the team.
• Mentor and guide engineers, conducting code reviews, pairing, and supporting career growth and skill development.
• Define and enforce engineering best practices around coding standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, and security.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps.
• Design and operate event-driven systems using Kafka for reliable, scalable inter-service communication.
• Manage cloud infrastructure and deployments on AWS, optimising for cost, performance, and resilience.
• Identify and resolve technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and production incidents.
1. Overall Software Engineering Experience (8+ years)
• Breadth: A minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and maintaining production-grade systems.
• Depth: Demonstrated progression from individual contributor to a senior or lead-level engineer, with ownership of significant features or systems.
• Fundamentals: Strong grounding in software design principles, data structures, algorithms, API design, and system architecture.
• Lifecycle: Experience across the full software development lifecycle — requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
2. Python & Web Frameworks (5+ years, Django or Flask)
• Core Python: At least 5 years of hands-on experience building applications in Python, with deep knowledge of the language and its ecosystem.
• Frameworks: Production experience with Django or Flask, including building and maintaining RESTful APIs and web services.
• Data & ORM: Proficiency with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL) and ORMs such as Django ORM or SQLAlchemy, including query optimisation.
• Quality: Strong testing discipline using frameworks such as pytest or unittest, and experience integrating tests into CI pipelines.
• Performance: Experience profiling, debugging, and scaling Python services under real-world load.
3. Cloud Engineering on AWS (Developer Perspective)
• Hands-on: Practical, developer-focused experience building and deploying applications on AWS — not just consuming managed services superficially.
• Core services: Working knowledge of services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, IAM, and API Gateway in the context of application development.
• Deployment: Experience packaging and deploying applications using containers (Docker), and familiarity with ECS/EKS or similar.
• Operations: Understanding of monitoring, logging, and alerting on AWS (e.g. CloudWatch) to keep services healthy in production.
• Best practices: Awareness of security, cost-efficiency, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. CloudFormation or Terraform) is a strong plus.
4. Technical Leadership & Team Management (3+ years)
• Leadership tenure: A minimum of 3 years leading engineering teams or squads, whether as a tech lead, team lead, or engineering manager.
• Mentorship: Proven ability to mentor and grow engineers through code reviews, pairing, and structured feedback.
• Delivery ownership: Experience planning, estimating, and delivering projects on time while managing scope and technical trade-offs.
• Collaboration: Skilled at working cross-functionally with product, design, and other engineering teams to align on goals and priorities.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication, able to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
5. Event Streaming with Apache Kafka (1+ year)
• Practical experience: At least 1 year of hands-on experience working with Apache Kafka in a production or near-production environment.
• Producers & consumers: Experience designing and implementing Kafka producers and consumers, including topic and partition design.
• Event-driven design: Understanding of event-driven architecture patterns, message ordering, delivery guarantees, and schema management.
• Reliability: Familiarity with handling failure scenarios such as retries, dead-letter queues, and consumer lag monitoring.

Required Qualifications & Experience
The following sections outline the core experience we require. Strong candidates will demonstrate depth across all of these areas.