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
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed