Back End Engineer at Hey Savi, UK, 3 Months initial, £250-£325 per day

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to architect and maintain our platform core services and infrastructure. This role is perfect for someone who thrives on building scalable, high-performance systems and enjoys empowering cross-functional teams through reliable backend services. You'll design and implement backend services that empower our Product vision, and optimise a cloud infrastructure to ensure our systems are secure, resilient, and ready for growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Technology Strategy: Shape the backend architecture and technical direction supporting our Product vision, implementing business rules and domain models, ensuring scalability, security, and reliability.
• Backend Service Development: Build and maintain core services for Product Catalogue, user Profiles, and Asset Management.
• API Design & Development: Create robust, well-documented APIs for internal and external use, with comprehensive contract testing and verification.
• Build, Deployment & Release Management: Ensure reproducible builds, provisioning, deployment, and releases by leveraging modern techniques such as Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, and other automated deployment methodologies.
• Observability, High Availability & Scalability: Ensure high system reliability and performance by implementing strong observability practices, including comprehensive metrics collection, structured logging, actionable dashboards, and proactive alerting. Design fault-tolerant systems ready for growth, implementing stress testing and disaster recovery.
• Security & Access Management: Implement secure authentication and authorization mechanisms while maintaining security compliance and data protection across all systems.
• Ways of Working & Cross-functional Collaboration: Lead technical proposals through RFCs and contribute to Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to align engineering efforts. Partner with frontend developers, data engineers, and ML teams to ensure seamless integration.

Requirements

Desirable Experience

Please note: You do not need to meet every criteria listed below. Specific technologies are provided as examples of the tools and practices we value.

• Scalable Backend Development: Designing and implementing scalable backend services using modern programming languages such as Kotlin, Python, Go, or Java with open-source frameworks like Ktor, Quarkus, FastAPI or Gin.
• Cloud Computing: Experience with AWS services such as ECS, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, and CloudFront, or equivalent cloud platforms.
• Database Management: Working with SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB) databases, including query optimization and indexing strategies.
• Microservices & Distributed Systems: Implementing service communication, discovery, load balancing, and resilience using tools such as gRPC, Kafka, Envoy, Istio, or Consul.
• API Development: Developing public APIs optimized for various use cases, including RESTful, GraphQL, WebSockets, and gRPC-web.
• Infrastructure & Automation: Managing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation for automated provisioning and deployment.
• Authentication & Security: Implementing authentication and authorization protocols such as OAuth, JWT, and OpenID Connect.
• Observability & Logging: Experience with observability tools and logging collection strategies using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ELK stack, or Datadog.
• Performance Optimization & Resilience: Applying performance tuning, caching strategies, circuit breakers, and fault tolerance techniques to ensure reliability and efficiency.
• Supporting Data Teams: Collaborating with data science, ETL, and web scraping teams by providing scalable and efficient backend solutions.

Who you are:

• Systematic Thinker & Problem Solver: You craft robust architectures, anticipate edge cases, and implement elegant, scalable solutions.
• Security & Performance Focused: You build systems that are both secure and efficient.
• Collaborative & Cross-functional: You excel at enabling teams through clear documentation and reliable services.
• Continuous Learner: You stay current with backend technologies and best practices.
• Ownership & Autonomy: You take initiative and drive development with minimal oversight.

PLEASE NOTE: If you don't meet 100% of the criteria but are passionate about our mission and think you can do the job—especially if our values and work principles resonate with you—we stronglyencourage you to apply!*

Location + Work Style

We’ll all be where we need to be based on what’s happening. We’ll have in-person team sessions (usually once a week) as needed for key activities like planning, strategy, and brainstorming sessions (and some fun!), and remote work the rest of the time to allow for flexibility, work-life balance, and quiet time for deep work.

Hey Savi is based in London and are looking for people in the UK and Europe to join our team. We regret that we can’t hire candidates from other locations or provide Visa sponsorship yet, but check back with us as we grow as we’ll be global soon!

Benefits

Daily rate: £250-£325 GBP/Day based on experience

Initial contract term 3 months followed by rolling monthly