Lead Backend Engineer

Lead Back End Developer - Contract role - London

Overview

A growing, data-driven organisation is looking for a Lead Back End Developer to shape and deliver the services that sit at the heart of its platform.

You’ll lead a team of engineers, own technical direction and stay hands-on in the code. The stack is flexible (Python, C# and others), so strong engineering fundamentals matter more than any one language.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and build of scalable, secure back end services and APIs

Own the architecture of event-driven pipelines built on Kafka

Set engineering standards across code quality, testing, CI/CD and documentation

Mentor developers, run code reviews and guide technical decisions

Work with product and data teams to turn requirements into reliable services

Make sure systems meet security and data protection expectations

Monitor, troubleshoot and improve performance and reliability in production

Skills and Experience

Strong commercial back end experience in Python, C#/.NET or a comparable language

Proven experience designing, building and versioning APIs (REST, and ideally gRPC or GraphQL)

Hands-on Kafka experience, including topic design, producers and consumers, and stream processing

Experience leading or mentoring engineers, or acting as a technical lead

Solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases

Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)

Details

£650 - £750 P/D (Inside IR35)

Hybrid role - 2 days P/W onsite

Initial 6 Month contract