Lead Backend Engineer

Job Title: Lead Backend Engineer Salary: Up to £145,000 base + equity Location: Central London Work Type: Hybrid, 3 to 4 days per week onsite Role: WeDo is partnering with a high growth AI startup building an agentic AI platform designed to solve complex, real world problems across global enterprise operations. The business is at an exciting stage of its journey. The foundations are in place, customers are using the technology, and the engineering team is now scaling both the platform and the systems behind it. They're looking for a Lead Backend Engineer who wants to be close to the product, customers and technical decisions rather than owning a small component within a much larger organisation. You'll be joining a highly technical engineering team and working on problems across AI, distributed systems, enterprise data and performance engineering. This is a hands on role with genuine ownership. You'll help determine how the platform evolves as usage, customers and data volumes continue to grow. Responsibilities: Design and build high performance backend services primarily in PythonBuild scalable distributed systems and APIsDevelop pipelines capable of processing large volumes of complex enterprise dataIntegrate with external APIs and legacy enterprise systemsDesign asynchronous and event driven architecturesIdentify and solve performance bottlenecks across production systemsThink critically about throughput, latency, computational cost and scalabilityBuild resilient systems capable of handling failures and unreliable dependenciesDefine and monitor SLOs around performance, reliability and availabilityWork closely with engineers, founders and customers to turn complex problems into pragmatic technical solutionsOwn what you build from architecture through to deployment and production Required Skills: 6+ years of software engineering experienceStrong commercial Python experienceExperience designing and operating distributed systemsExperience with high throughput or data intensive applicationsStrong understanding of performance engineering and scalabilityExperience identifying and resolving real production bottlenecksStrong API and systems integration experienceExperience with Docker and KubernetesExperience within cloud environmentsUnderstanding of asynchronous processing and messaging architecturesStrong knowledge of observability, monitoring and SLOsExperience owning systems from initial architecture through to productionStrong communication skills and confidence making and defending architectural decisions Experience building backend or platform infrastructure around AI, LLMs, Generative AI or agentic applications would be highly advantageous. Why should I apply? This is an opportunity to join an AI business at a stage where the engineering decisions you make can still genuinely shape the company and its technology. Rather than maintaining mature systems or working within one narrow part of a large platform, you'll have ownership of complex engineering problems and see the direct impact of what you build. You'll work across Python, distributed systems, large scale data, performance engineering and AI, solving problems where simply adding more infrastructure isn't always the answer. You'll also work closely with senior engineers, founders and customers as the platform scales, giving you exposure well beyond your immediate technical responsibilities. If you enjoy understanding why systems break, where bottlenecks occur and how to build software that performs reliably at scale, this is an opportunity to tackle those problems within a fast growing AI company. Interested? Apply for the role today or send your CV to pierre.rodriguez@wedotech.uk