Senior Python Developer

Job Description

Senior Python Backend Engineer Web Scraping Project

6-month contract 500 per day London Hybrid working

A specialist sports modelling and trading technology business is looking for a Senior Python Backend Engineer to join its platform team on an initial six-month contract.

The role will focus on a business-critical web scraping project designed to expand and improve access to external liquidity providers and real-time market data. Youll build reliable low-latency services that collect process and distribute data from external platforms including systems that may not provide stable or conventional APIs.

This is a strong opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys technically challenging work involving web scraping reverse engineering real-time data imperfect third-party integrations and production systems where speed correctness and reliability all matter.

Youll work within a small highly capable engineering team and take ownership of services with a direct commercial impact.

What youll be doing

• Building and maintaining high-performance web scraping and data collection services using Python and asyncio
• Reverse engineering websites network requests and third-party platforms to identify reliable methods of accessing real-time data
• Developing low-latency data feeds that integrate with internal trading systems
• Designing resilient services that can respond to changes in external websites and data sources
• Managing challenges such as session handling authentication rate limits retries timeouts and changing page structures
• Creating stable internal interfaces that shield the wider trading platform from unreliable external systems
• Working with distributed systems event-driven architecture and high-throughput messaging
• Improving observability using structured logging latency metrics distributed tracing dashboards heartbeats and alerting
• Contributing to architectural decisions and the technical direction of the project
• Supporting engineering quality through code reviews documentation and knowledge sharing

What were looking for

• Strong backend engineering experience using Python
• Commercial experience building web scraping data extraction or automated data collection systems
• Experience working with asynchronous Python ideally using asyncio
• An understanding of browser behaviour HTTP APIs authentication cookies sessions and network requests
• Experience reverse engineering websites or undocumented third-party integrations
• Knowledge of distributed systems messaging platforms or event-driven architecture
• A thoughtful approach to reliability resilience and operational behaviour
• Strong judgement around architecture maintainability and pragmatic delivery
• Confidence working with business-critical production systems
• Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail

Experience with trading systems real-time data feeds low-latency services browser automation or rapidly changing third-party platforms would be particularly relevant.

Technology environment

The wider technology environment includes:

Python asyncio Kafka RabbitMQ Redis PostgreSQL LXD Containers Ansible and OpenTelemetry alongside modern AI engineering tools such asClaude Code Cursor and Codex.

Contract details

• Initial six-month contract
• 500 per day Outside IR35
• London-based hybrid working

For a Senior Python Backend Engineer who wants to work at the sharp end of real-time trading technology this is an opportunity to deliver a technically complex web scraping project where performance reliability and correctness genuinely matter.