Lead Software Engineer

Senior/Lead Backend Engineer (Python) - 2x roles

Location: Hybrid / Remote (UK)

Salary: Competitive + Benefits

Recruitment Partner: Searchability

About the Opportunity

Searchability is partnering with a fast-growing technology consultancy delivering cutting-edge software, AI and cloud solutions for enterprise clients.

We are looking for a highly skilled Senior Backend Engineer to join a high-performing engineering team responsible for building scalable, secure and resilient backend systems. This role offers the opportunity to work on modern cloud-native architectures, AI/ML-powered platforms and large-scale distributed systems while helping shape the technical direction of critical products.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced Python engineer who enjoys solving complex technical challenges, driving engineering best practices and building highly scalable backend services.

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, developing and maintaining backend systems that power modern applications and AI-driven platforms. You'll work closely with frontend engineers, product teams, data scientists and stakeholders to deliver robust, secure and high-performance solutions.

The role combines backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, API development and MLOps, making it ideal for someone who enjoys working across the full software development lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain scalable backend applications and APIs using Python.
• Build and support microservices architectures using REST, GraphQL and gRPC.
• Deploy, host and manage AI/ML models in production environments, ensuring reliability, scalability and performance.
• Integrate machine learning models into backend systems and expose model capabilities through APIs.
• Optimise database performance, schemas and queries across SQL and NoSQL environments.
• Implement authentication, authorisation and security best practices across backend services.
• Collaborate closely with frontend engineers to deliver seamless user experiences.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues while maintaining high system availability.
• Build automated testing frameworks and contribute to CI/CD pipelines.
• Monitor application performance and system health using modern observability tools.
• Contribute to architecture discussions and technical decision-making.
• Maintain high-quality technical documentation and engineering standards.

Required Experience

Technical Skills

• 8+ years of commercial backend engineering experience.
• Strong Python development experience, including FastAPI, Flask or similar frameworks.
• Proven experience building and scaling backend services and APIs.
• Strong understanding of microservices architectures and event-driven systems.
• Experience designing and optimising high-performance distributed systems.
• Strong SQL experience (PostgreSQL, MySQL or similar).
• Experience working with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud services.
• Experience deploying containerised applications using Docker.
• Familiarity with container orchestration platforms such as ECS or Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of API security, authentication and authorisation frameworks including JWT, OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.
• Experience with system performance optimisation, caching, indexing and scalability best practices.

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Self-motivated with a proactive approach to continuous improvement.
• Passion for learning and staying current with emerging technologies.
• Ability to work effectively within cross-functional engineering teams.

Desirable Experience

• Experience with MLOps and production AI/ML systems.
• Familiarity with Kafka, AWS SQS or other messaging platforms.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Knowledge of observability platforms including Datadog and CloudWatch.
• Experience building serverless applications using AWS Lambda.
• Exposure to Agile delivery environments and Jira.
• AWS certifications or equivalent cloud certifications.

Tech Stack

Languages & Frameworks

• Python
• FastAPI
• Flask

Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS
• Docker
• ECS
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• CloudFormation

Architecture

• Microservices
• Event-Driven Systems
• REST APIs
• GraphQL
• gRPC

Databases

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MongoDB

DevOps & Monitoring

• GitHub Actions
• CI/CD
• Datadog
• CloudWatch

Security

• JWT
• OAuth2
• OpenID Connect
• Microsoft Entra ID

What's on Offer?

• Competitive salary and benefits package
• Opportunity to work on AI/ML and cloud-native platforms
• Exposure to large-scale distributed systems and modern backend architectures
• Collaborative engineering culture with strong technical ownership
• Career development opportunities within a rapidly growing technology business
• Access to cutting-edge technologies across cloud, data and AI

If you're an experienced Python Backend Engineer looking to work on scalable systems, cloud infrastructure and AI-driven technologies, we'd love to hear from you.