SC Clearance or eligibility for SC Clearance Essential

Backend Focus

3 month contract with scope to extend or go permanent

Key Responsibilities

Yourresponsibilitieswillinclude, but not limited to:

Backend architecture &APIs (primary focus)

• Design and evolve scalable backend services in Python using FastAPI for high-availability, high-throughput workloads.
• Build well-versioned RESTful APIs aligned to OpenAPI/Swagger, with strong conventions for consistency, idempotency, and backward compatibility.
• Implement authentication and authorization using OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained permissions.
• Design and maintain event-driven architectures and background processing pipelines (e.g. Celery, Redis Streams, Kafka) to enable scalable async workloads, retries, and fault-tolerant integrations.
• Design data models and optimise relational databases (PostgreSQL) for performance, partitioning, and horizontal scale.
• Introduce caching, rate limiting, and queuing to meet performance budgets and latency goals.
• Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and robust error/retry semantics.

Frontend contributions

• Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript as required.
• Work with product and design to take features end-to-end, from API through to UI.
• Help maintain a pragmatic frontend stack with a focus on shipping over perfection, without compromising on security.

Infrastructure contributions

• Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds.
• Contribute to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team
• Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod.

Security and reliability

• Write secure, well-tested code (unit, integration, end-to-end) and uphold coding standards through code reviews.
• Contribute to logging, metrics, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for the services you build.
• Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design.

Cross-functional and process

• Collaborate closely with the engineering team, product and leadership to scope, sequence, and deliver outcomes.
• Translate product requirements into technical plans, breaking work into milestones with measurable success criteria.
• Mentor engineers on backend design, API ergonomics.

Qualifications,experienceand skills

• SC Clearance or the ability to obtain SC (and later DV).
• Proven experience in professional software engineering, with a strong focus on backend development in Python and with event-driven architectures.
• Proven experience designing and operating production REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger.
• Comfortable working in a React/TypeScript codebase.
• Deep understanding of relational database design, indexing, performance tuning, and migrations (PostgreSQL).
• Proficiency with containerisation (Docker) and Git-based workflows.
• Familiarity with AWS core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, ALB/ELB, ECR/ECS).
• Experience with API versioning, security, documentation strategies, and automated testing.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently with high ownership.

Soft skills

• High-agency engineer who owns outcomes end to end.
• Pragmatic, research-driven approach with a bias to ship and iterate.
• Clear communicator who can mentor, influence, and raise the bar for the team.
• Comfortable defining SLAs, making trade-offs explicit, and operating production systems.