Python Lead

Tech Lead

Backend Engineering - Python (Django / Flask)

We are looking for an experienced Tech Lead to drive the design development and delivery of our backend this role you will combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership - setting direction mentoring engineers and owning the quality and scalability of the services your team builds.

You will work primarily within a Python ecosystem (Django or Flask) deploy and operate workloads on AWS and design event-driven data flows using Apache Kafka. Beyond writing code you will be accountable for architecture decisions engineering standards and the growth of the people on your team.

• Lead the technical design and architecture of backend services APIs and data pipelines balancing scalability reliability and maintainability.
• Own delivery of features end to end - from requirements and design through implementation code review testing deployment and production support.
• Provide hands-on engineering contribution writing high-quality well-tested Python code and setting the standard for the team.
• Mentor and guide engineers conducting code reviews pairing and supporting career growth and skill development.
• Define and enforce engineering best practices around coding standards testing CI/CD observability and security.
• Collaborate with product managers designers and other stakeholders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps.
• Design and operate event-driven systems using Kafka for reliable scalable inter-service communication.
• Manage cloud infrastructure and deployments on AWS optimising for cost performance and resilience.
• Identify and resolve technical debt performance bottlenecks and production incidents.

The following sections outline the core experience we require. Strong candidates will demonstrate depth across all of these areas.

• Breadth: A minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of shipping and maintaining production-grade systems.
• Depth: Demonstrated progression from individual contributor to a senior or lead-level engineer with ownership of significant features or systems.
• Fundamentals: Strong grounding in software design principles data structures algorithms API design and system architecture.
• Lifecycle: Experience across the full software development lifecycle - requirements design implementation testing deployment and maintenance.

• Core Python: At least 5 years of hands-on experience building applications in Python with deep knowledge of the language and its ecosystem.
• Frameworks: Production experience with Django or Flask including building and maintaining RESTful APIs and web services.
• Data & ORM: Proficiency with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL MySQL) and ORMs such as Django ORM or SQLAlchemy including query optimisation.
• Quality: Strong testing discipline using frameworks such as pytest or unittest and experience integrating tests into CI pipelines.
• Performance: Experience profiling debugging and scaling Python services under real-world load.

• Hands-on: Practical developer-focused experience building and deploying applications on AWS - not just consuming managed services superficially.
• Core services: Working knowledge of services such as EC2 S3 Lambda RDS IAM and API Gateway in the context of application development.
• Deployment: Experience packaging and deploying applications using containers (Docker) and familiarity with ECS/EKS or similar.
• Operations: Understanding of monitoring logging and alerting on AWS (e.g. CloudWatch) to keep services healthy in production.
• Best practices: Awareness of security cost-efficiency and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. CloudFormation or Terraform) is a strong plus.

• Leadership tenure: A minimum of 3 years leading engineering teams or squads whether as a tech lead team lead or engineering manager.
• Mentorship: Proven ability to mentor and grow engineers through code reviews pairing and structured feedback.
• Delivery ownership: Experience planning estimating and delivering projects on time while managing scope and technical trade-offs.
• Collaboration: Skilled at working cross-functionally with product design and other engineering teams to align on goals and priorities.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication able to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Practical experience: At least 1 year of hands-on experience working with Apache Kafka in a production or near-production environment.
• Producers & consumers: Experience designing and implementing Kafka producers and consumers including topic and partition design.
• Event-driven design: Understanding of event-driven architecture patterns message ordering delivery guarantees and schema management.
• Reliability: Familiarity with handling failure scenarios such as retries dead-letter queues and consumer lag monitoring.

• Experience with asynchronous task queues (e.g. Celery RQ) and caching layers (e.g. Redis).
• Exposure to microservices architecture and service-to-service communication patterns.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (e.g. GitHub Actions GitLab CI Jenkins).
• Contributions to open-source projects or an active engineering community presence.
• Experience working in Agile / Scrum environments.

• A pragmatic ownership-driven mindset and a bias toward delivering value.
• Strong problem-solving skills and sound technical judgement under ambiguity.
• A collaborative attitude and genuine investment in the growth of your teammates.
• Commitment to quality security and continuous improvement.