Backend Engineer

This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies. We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process. If you're interested sign up to Dex to apply. Dex is an AI recruiter agent that helps you run your job search. Tell Dex your stack, seniority, and what you want to build. We will manage your applications and surface other opportunities that are a fit. The role This company builds the control plane for data and AI pipelines, used in production by major enterprises and trusted by a community of over 30,000 data practitioners. They're tackling the fundamental challenge of orchestrating complex data workflows and, increasingly, the emerging world of AI agents. Backed by leading investors, they're growing rapidly in a critical, underserved market. You'll own the core orchestration engine: the machinery that schedules, executes, and manages state for every pipeline. This isn't a backend role where you hand off infrastructure or QA to other teams; you'll drive features from concept to production, writing the Terraform and debugging what you ship. The team is small, generalist, and focused on the hardest problems, particularly in the nascent AI agent layer. The work Design and build the core orchestration engine: scheduling, execution, state management, retries, concurrency, and cancellation.Engineer for highly variable load, ensuring capacity, back-pressure, and isolation for systems with extreme peak-to-average ratios.Drive features end-to-end, from initial concept through to production deployment, including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and monitoring.Tackle the least-solved problems in the AI-native layer, building out the control plane for AI agents.Debug complex production failures and optimise systems under real-world, high-load conditions. What You Bring Deep production Python experience, having made architectural decisions and understood language edges.Proven judgment in distributed systems: retries, idempotency, state machines, queues, and debugging race conditions under load.A cloud-native mindset, treating infrastructure (IaC, serverless) as part of your remit, not someone else's.Strong data modelling instinct, with experience making and learning from critical state persistence decisions.A bias to shipping, prioritising impact and knowing when to iterate versus gold-plate.Eligibility to work in the UK. Why apply through Dex This isn't a generic backend role. It's a high-ownership seat at a company building critical infrastructure for data and AI, tackling genuinely hard problems. Dex helps you cut through the noise: sign up once, get matched to this role and others like it, and get properly briefed before you even apply. If you're interested, sign up to Dex to apply - https://jobs.meetdex.ai/jobs/ee71eb07-d22e-4664-87d2-05e64c630b54 As part of the recruitment process at Dex, we process your personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice for Job Applicants. This notice explains how and why your data is collected and used, and how you can contact us if you have any concerns.