Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer (Python / Django) Remote (UK) with regular travel to London (1-week per month) Salary: £125-150K About the Business We're partnering with a venture-backed software company building an AI-first platform that helps users automate complex decision-making and operational workflows. Rather than acting as a traditional software tool, the platform continuously analyses context, coordinates intelligent systems behind the scenes, and proactively completes work on behalf of its users. The engineering team is still relatively small, meaning every hire has a genuine opportunity to influence architecture, product direction and engineering culture. Following strong early customer adoption and recent funding, the business is investing heavily in expanding its core engineering function. The Opportunity They're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join a highly collaborative engineering team building distributed backend systems that power AI-enabled products at scale. You'll own projects from initial technical design through to production, helping build reliable infrastructure, scalable APIs and intelligent backend services. The role combines traditional backend engineering with modern AI infrastructure, requiring someone equally comfortable building production software and solving complex systems problems. Working closely with engineering leadership, product and design, you'll have significant ownership over technical decisions and play an important role in scaling both the platform and engineering standards. What You'll Be Doing Design, develop and maintain scalable backend applications using Python and DjangoBuild secure, well-designed REST APIs consumed across multiple productsDeliver projects from architecture through deployment and long-term maintenanceDevelop and optimise asynchronous processing pipelines and distributed workloadsBuild integrations with large language models and AI servicesWork on retrieval systems, knowledge pipelines and contextual data processingImprove database performance, indexing strategies and complex SQL queriesMonitor production systems and troubleshoot live issuesImprove observability, reliability and platform resilienceContribute to cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelinesChampion secure development practices and support regulatory compliance initiativesParticipate in code reviews, mentoring and engineering best practicesCollaborate daily with frontend engineers, product managers and designers What They're Looking For Experience 5+ years building production backend applicationsStrong commercial experience with PythonExtensive experience developing applications with Django Backend Engineering Excellent understanding of Django and Django REST FrameworkStrong SQL knowledge with experience designing performant relational databasesExperience building and maintaining asynchronous task processing (Celery or similar)Strong understanding of scalable backend architectureExperience building observable, resilient production services AI & Data Experience integrating LLMs into production applicationsExposure to AI infrastructure, agent-based architectures or retrieval systemsExperience working with large datasets or intelligent automation platforms Cloud & Infrastructure Experience deploying and operating cloud-native applications (GCP preferred)Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform ideal)Experience supporting and maintaining production environments If you would like to hear more about this opportunity, get in touch with Christian at Albert Bow