Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure (United Kingdom)

Location: Remote (Global)

Team Size: ≈ 10 engineers

Core Stack: Ruby on Rails (API-only), Sidekiq, MySQL, AWS (EC2, RDS, EFS), Highcharts.js (data consumers)

About INDY

INDY powers every operational layer of a movie theater—from ticket sales and concessions to scheduling, accounting, and real-time business intelligence. Our platform handles tens of millions of tickets a year across cinemas worldwide, yet we remain a nimble team where each engineer’s work is felt immediately in theaters on six continents.

Why This Role Exists

Our home-grown reporting platform is the analytical backbone of INDY. It decomposes incoming queries into thousands of parallel Sidekiq jobs (hourly → daily → weekly → monthly roll-ups) and serves the results back to cinema managers in seconds. As volume soars, we need a backend-focused engineer to:

● Own and harden this distributed reporting engine.

● Design data pipelines that can ingest years of transactional data and still answer ad-hoc questions quickly.

● You will partner with—but not be accountable for—front-end engineers who wire these APIs into Vue-based dashboards.

What You’ll Do

● Architect & Scale

○ Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.

○ Tune Sidekiq queues, worker pools, and EC2 autoscaling groups for bursty loads.

○ Refactor long-running jobs into idempotent, parallelizable units.

● Maintain Data Integrity & Observability

○ Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.

○ Instrument metrics/alerting around throughput, latency, and cost.

● Expand Administrative Workflows

○ Expose clean GraphQL/REST contracts that power accounting tools for film bookings, revenue splits, and studio payouts.

○ Introduce domain-specific abstractions (DSLs, helpers) so other engineers can add new report types rapidly.

● Collaborate Across Functions

○ Work with infra engineers on Terraform-managed AWS resources.

○ Pair with front-end devs to ensure APIs are ergonomic and secure.

○ Advise product and finance teams on data-model trade-offs.

What We’re Looking For

Must-Have

Nice-to-Have

5+ yrs building high-throughput backend systems

Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores

Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise

Exposure to ClickHouse/Redshift/BigQuery

Hands-on MySQL tuning (indexes, partitioning, query plans)

Event-driven or stream processing (Kafka, Kinesis)

Proven record scaling background-job frameworks (Sidekiq, Resque, Celery, etc.)

Familiarity with data-viz pipelines (we use Highcharts.js)

AWS production experience (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC)

Contributions to OSS or tech-blog posts on performance

What Success Looks Like (6-12 Months)

● Daily report-generation latency cut by 50 % while data volume doubles.

● Zero-downtime schema migrations and automated backfill strategy in place.

● First phase of studio-settlement APIs shipped and adopted by finance ops.

● Comprehensive dashboards/alerts proactively surface scaling limits before customers notice.

Why INDY Rocks

● Massive Visible Impact – Your optimizations ripple out to millions of moviegoers.

● Start-to-Finish Ownership – No layers of bureaucracy; ship, measure, iterate.

● Technically Spicy – Distributed computing meets real-world financial correctness.

Tight-Knit Crew – Collaborate directly with founders and domain experts.