Principal Backend Engineer

Annual releases gave way to two-week sprints years ago, and the platform now handles over 200 million API calls a day. We started in 1992 and have grown to about 4,100 people. We keep recurring meetings to Tuesdays and Thursdays where we can.

Role overview:

This is a newly created position. Canopycast is hiring for the Principal Backend Engineer position to build and run the APIs and services behind our web and mobile apps. The Core API team owns services that process several million requests a day. We need another engineer who is comfortable owning them in production. The work is on site and cannot be done remotely.

Key responsibilities:

• Implement background jobs and event consumers using Kafka, SQS or RabbitMQ.
• Model data and write migrations for PostgreSQL, MySQL or DynamoDB.
• Write integration and contract tests so API changes don't break consumers.
• Containerize services with Docker and deploy them to Kubernetes or ECS.
• Document APIs in OpenAPI and keep the docs current.
• Tune slow queries, add indexes and read query plans.
• Handle on-call for services the team owns and lead incident follow-ups.
• Coordinate with frontend and mobile engineers on API contracts and versioning.

What you need:

• Strong SQL and relational data modelling skills.
• Clear written communication, including design docs.
• Working knowledge of message queues or streaming platforms.
• Experience designing and versioning HTTP APIs.
• Comfort reading logs, metrics and traces to debug problems in production.
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, C# or Node.js.

Preferred:

• Kubernetes, including Helm charts.
• Terraform or Pulumi.
• Background with high-volume payment or ledger systems.

Compensation and benefits:

• Healthcare cash plan.
• Company pension.
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.
• Season ticket loan.
• Flexible working hours.

We are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion, and we welcome applications from everyone.

This role is subject to a basic DBS check.

Start: Immediately.

Demo job created on 11jobs for testing and demonstrations. It is not an actual opening at Canopycast.