Lead Backend Engineer

Lead Back End Developer - Contract role - London

Overview
A growing, data-driven organisation is looking for a Lead Back End Developer to shape and deliver the services that sit at the heart of its platform.

You'll lead a team of engineers, own technical direction and stay hands-on in the code. The stack is flexible (Python, C# and others), so strong engineering fundamentals matter more than any one language.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and build of scalable, secure back end services and APIs
• Own the architecture of event-driven pipelines built on Kafka
• Set engineering standards across code quality, testing, CI/CD and documentation
• Mentor developers, run code reviews and guide technical decisions
• Work with product and data teams to turn requirements into reliable services
• Make sure systems meet security and data protection expectations
• Monitor, troubleshoot and improve performance and reliability in production

Skills and Experience

• Strong commercial back end experience in Python, C#/.NET or a comparable language
• Proven experience designing, building and versioning APIs (REST, and ideally gRPC or GraphQL)
• Hands-on Kafka experience, including topic design, producers and consumers, and stream processing
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers, or acting as a technical lead
• Solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases
• Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)

Details

• £650 - £750 P/D (Inside IR35)
• Hybrid role - 2 days P/W onsite
• Initial 6 Month contract