Backend Software Engineer (Remote, UK)

About Esenda

Esenda powers over £1.5bn of inbound and outbound payments annually, in the education space - from tuition and catering fees to supplier payments and payroll.

We’re a revenue-generating startup with strong product-market fit, and we’re growing fast.

Join us now and you’ll work on impactful features that directly shape our platform and make a real difference to our customers.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and ship reliable backend services and APIs in Python (Flask) that power core product functionality.
• Own features end-to-end: data modelling (Postgres), API design, testing, production rollout and ongoing improvements.
• Help uphold strong engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, testing discipline, clean architecture, and pragmatic decision-making.
• Improve service reliability and operability: monitoring, alerting, logging, runbooks, and reducing on-call toil over time.
• Work closely with the technical team to scope product ideas, focused on delivering customer-facing outcomes (not just “tickets”).
• Contribute to delivery practices: CI/CD improvements, incremental shipping, and maintaining a high-quality codebase.
• You’ll join an on-call rotation (1 week in 4) compensation: paid as an extra £300 per on-call week.

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years experience building and operating production backend systems.
• Strong experience with Python, and hands-on use of Flask (or similar frameworks).
• Solid understanding of Postgres (schemas, migrations, query performance, transactions).
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs (REST; event-driven experience is a plus).
• Comfortable shipping in cloud environments—ideally AWS—and working with modern CI/CD pipelines.
• A strong quality mindset: you care about maintainability, security, reliability, and clear documentation.

Bonus points for

• Payments/fintech knowledge (reconciliation, idempotency, auditability, ledger concepts).
• Experience with distributed systems patterns (queues, background jobs, retries, rate limiting).
• Security experience (threat modelling, OWASP-style concerns, secure API design).
• Familiarity with Terraform.

Why join us?

• £60k salary + equity
• 40 days holiday (incl. bank holidays)
• Pension scheme (3% employer contribution)
• Fully remote, UK-based, with 3 in-person meetups per year
• A transparent, collaborative, and supportive culture

Our stack (today)

• Backend: Python, Flask
• Data: Postgres
• Cloud: AWS
• Edge: Cloudflare
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
• Delivery: CI/CD, automated testing, observability tooling

How we work

• Pragmatic, high-ownership teams with a bias to shipping
• Clear communication, strong collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Code reviews and sensible standards that keep quality high without slowing delivery

Interview process

• 30-min intro call (role fit, values, ways of working)
• Practical exercise (small take-home or pairing session)
• Technical interview (backend fundamentals, API design, production thinking)
• Team chat + Q&A