Backend Engineer

Are you interested in designing world-leading sign language technology, networking with businesses, the third sector and individual professionals? Are you ready to join a small and experienced team working towards a mission to make spoken and written languages accessible to Deaf people? If you have the right skills and are socially motivated to support access for deaf people we are keen to support your application on behalf of our retained client.

This position is offered as fully remote from mainland England as will require 1 day per month in London with the team. This highly eager and talented hire is needed due to significant new contract wins and technical progress.

The Company

Our client is an exciting and fast-growing funded start-up that is bringing together AI and Sign Language. The technology is grounded in world-leading computer vision research developed at the University of Surrey. This AI product is being used with a number of major global brands that bring life-enhancing benefits to sign language users and there are already significant contracts. They are now onto the next phase and this is the holy grail: unconstrained translation for sign language.

Essential Requirements

They need a backend engineer who’s excited by solving hard problems, shipping clean code, and be an instrumental part of a fast-moving team. You’ll be working with modern tooling and helping shape the technical direction.

You should have:

• Proficiency in at least one of the core languages : Rust, Go, or Kotlin. Experience with more than one is a plus, and you should be comfortable picking up new languages as needed.
• Professional experience building and scaling backend systems in a commercial software environment.
• A track record of designing and building efficient, scalable RESTful APIs .
• Experience working with websockets and webhooks .
• Experience building and maintaining public APIs that are used by external developers or customers.
• A strong grasp of API security best practices and building secure-by-default systems.
• Experience with both relational and NoSQL databases and understanding when to use which.
• Knowledge of and experience with event-driven architectures (e.g. message queues, pub/sub, event sourcing).
• A solid understanding of system design — how to build for resilience, maintainability, and scalability.
• The ability to make thoughtful trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity .
• Experience working with both microservices and monoliths , and the judgment to know which to use when.
• A habit of writing thorough automated tests — unit, integration, and end-to-end — as part of your development process.
• A mindset that’s open to experimentation and continuous improvement .
• A collaborative approach — you’re a team player who’s happy to help, share knowledge, and learn from others.

Desirable Requirements

Not required, but let us know if you have experience with any of the following:

• Working with open-source video tooling like FFMPEG or GStreamer.
• Implementing caching strategies to optimise system performance and database load.
• Deploying, monitoring, and operating applications in cloud environments like AWS.
• Familiarity with serverless platforms like AWS Lambda.
• Collaborating closely with frontend, DevOps, and product teams to deliver customer-focused features.
• Experience in Agile environments and contributing to iterative planning and delivery.
• Setting up and maintaining CI/CD pipelines , ideally with GitHub Actions or similar tools.
• Developing SDKs or libraries that enable developers to interact with APIs or services.

Responsibilities

Building an API for subtitle generation. You’ll do this by:

• Identifying what internal and external applications require integration with subtitles ideally wanting to reduce and duplication across the estate
• Implement a scalable REST API that could be hosted in AWS using industry standard frameworks and practices
• Utilise external packages and tools to reduce workload
• Write a comprehensive test suite that tests multiple scenarios
• Work with the DevOps team to deploy the API and monitor the API in production
• Work with the product team to capture feedback and implement improvements

Benefits

• 24 days’ holiday pro-rata plus bank holidays, company pension scheme
• Competitive compensation and high-value equity package
• Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies and be involved at the early stages of a high growth business.
• All equipment provided
• Paid training after 12-24 months
• Support with ATW and access to pool of interpreters
• Salary to £60K for the right experience and person.

Hours

This is a full-time position of 5 days a week, with normal virtual office hours of 9am to 6pm, although flexibility is offered to suit reasonable personal circumstances. What matters most to us is strong work ethic, teamwork and delivery of high-quality output.

Please note you must have the right to work and live full-time in the UK when you apply for this

position.

We are committed to eliminating discrimination and encouraging diversity in our team. Our aim is that our team will be truly representative of all sections of society and each employee feels respected and able to give their best.