Mid-Level Backend Engineer (London)

Backend Engineer (Mid-Level) - Go / Python

London / Hybrid

Full-time

£70,000 - £85,000 + equity

nHabit is building a new way to understand and navigate cities - using routing intelligence, geospatial data, and graph-based systems to reflect how people actually live, move, and connect.

We're an early-stage, product-led company with real technical depth. This role is for a strong mid-level backend engineer who wants meaningful ownership, exposure to real production systems, and the chance to grow alongside a thoughtful engineering team.

The Role

You'll work on the backend services that power the nHabit platform, building APIs, data pipelines, and infrastructure that are reliable, observable, and scalable. You'll collaborate closely with product, mobile, and frontend engineers, and take responsibility for features from development through to production.

This is not a "ticket factory" role. You'll be trusted to think, contribute, and improve how things are built.

What You'll Be Doing

• Building and maintaining production backend services in Go and Python
• Designing and implementing clean REST APIs
• Working with PostgreSQL, writing and optimising SQL queries
• Developing services in a containerised, microservices environment
• Integrating with third-party APIs and internal services
• Building background jobs and data ingestion pipelines
• Deploying and operating services on AWS (ECS, RDS, S3)
• Using Infrastructure as Code to manage environments
• Debugging and resolving production issues using logs and metrics
• Collaborating closely with product, mobile, and frontend teams
• Owning features end-to-end, from development to production

What We're Looking For (Must Have)

• Experience building and maintaining production backend services
• Solid experience with Golang, or strong willingness to learn Go
• Experience using Python for APIs, scripts, or data processing
• Experience building REST APIs
• Familiarity with microservices architectures
• Strong experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL
• Confident SQL query writing, with basic optimisation and indexing
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs
• Familiarity with background jobs and scheduled tasks
• Working knowledge of AWS, particularly ECS, RDS, and S3
• Basic understanding of networking concepts (VPCs, security groups)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (preferably AWS CDK or CloudFormation)
• Experience working with Docker and containerised services
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions)
• Understanding of authentication, authorisation, and API security
• Experience writing unit tests and basic integration tests
• Ability to debug production issues using logs and metrics
• A collaborative mindset and an ownership-driven approach to work

Nice to Have (Not Required)

• Deeper Go knowledge (concurrency, performance tuning)
• Experience with gRPC, Protobuf, or event-driven systems
• Exposure to graph databases, geospatial queries, or search systems
• Familiarity with observability tooling and monitoring
• Awareness of cloud cost optimisation
• Interest in learning more about platform, performance, or system design

What Matters to Us

We're looking for people who are genuinely interested in what we're building and want to grow with the company over the long term. Curiosity, care for quality, and a willingness to learn matter as much as what you already know.

Interview Process

• Behavioural interview
• Take-home technical challenge (approximately 3 hours)
• Technical interview
• Final conversation with CEO (general discussion and compensation)

Why Join nHabit

• Meaningful ownership in an early-stage product
• Exposure to real production systems and decision-making
• Thoughtful engineering culture with high standards
• Clear opportunity to grow as the company scales

If you're a strong mid-level backend engineer looking for real responsibility and room to grow, we'd love to hear from you at steven@nhabit.com