Backend Engineer

Augur; Greater London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Augur is seeking an early-stage Backend Engineer to design and build distributed systems and storage infrastructure for our sensor integration platform. You’ll work across the full backend surface—from stream processing to APIs—primarily in Rust, with Python at API boundaries.

You’ll own architectural decisions and help scale a growing integration and customer base, driving robust, well-abstracted systems as we expand. Collaboration and curiosity are essential in our fast-growing team.

Qualifications

• Candidates are not required to have experience with all listed technologies.
• Adjacent understanding of related systems is acceptable.
• Strong backend design and architectural thinking are valued.

Responsibilities

• Design and build distributed backend systems and storage infrastructure.
• Develop platform primitives and APIs across the backend stack.
• Own architectural decisions and scale systems for growing customer base.
• Collaborate across teams to shape engineering culture and practices.

Skills

Systems thinking

Software craft

Reasoning under uncertainty

AI-assisted development

Collaboration

Tools

Rust

Python

Kafka

PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB/PostGIS

gRPC/protobuf

Kubernetes

Job description

About Augur

Augur transforms legacy sensor systems into real-time operational intelligence. We help organisations act before threats expand – not after damage is done. Everything we build is privacy-first by design.

Our platform connects to existing cameras and sensors to detect threats, retrace events, and surface real-time insights – all without replacing a single device. Augur helps teams reduce risk, cut costs, and grow revenue through better visibility, faster decisions, and fewer blind spots.

Our culture is built on a foundation of radical candor and mutual trust. We recognise that being an industry leader requires more than just building exceptional products – it requires empowering a team of exceptional people. Individually, we operate with high autonomy; collectively, we’re unified by a shared drive to achieve our mission through a commitment to excellence.

The Role

We’re looking for an early stage engineer who pairs strong software skills with an ambitious, exploratory mindset aligned towards continuous learning and growing their impact. This is an exciting opportunity to join the Augur Engineering team at a pivotal moment — we’re a small team within a rapidly scaling organisation, so we each play a role in shaping Augur’s engineering culture, practices, and foundations as we grow.

We are looking for a Backend Engineer who can design and build the distributed systems, storage infrastructure, and platform primitives that underpin Augur's sensor integration product. You'll work across the full backend surface: from stream processing and storage, to API design, data pipelines, and service architecture, in a Rust stack with Python at the platform API boundaries.

You’ll be responsible for building robust, well-abstracted systems that scale with the demands of a growing integration and customer base, with ambitions of petabyte-scale data storage. You’ll own meaningful architectural decisions and be expected to reason clearly through unfamiliar problem domains under real constraints.

Core Skills

• Core technologies: Rust, with Python at some API boundaries. Kafka, PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB/PostGIS, gRPC/protobuf, and Kubernetes.

Candidates are not expected to have experience with all of these, but adjacent understanding is crucial.

• Systems thinking: Comfortable designing and operating production systems under real constraints— zero-downtime migrations, complex tradeoff analysis, and the kind of pragmatic decision-making that keeps services reliable as requirements shift.
• Software craft: Writes clean, well-structured code with good use of abstractions, namespaces, and interfaces. Opinionated about code review processes and culture.
• Reasoning under uncertainty: Can pick up unfamiliar systems and make sound architectural decisions without a complete picture.
• AI-assisted development: Fluent with LLM-assisted workflows and confident both steering AI tooling toward high-quality output and knowing which problems are better solved by humans.
• Collaboration: Experience or appetite for cross-team communication; comfortable seeking out context independently and building features with limited top-down instruction.

Desirable

• Prior experience with large-scale data infrastructure, i.e. distributed storage, sharded databases, high-throughput pipelines. Bonus if you've built your own or have experience with the primitives for building your own, e.g. sharding libraries, consistent hashing, data-parallel dataflow computation, etc.

Accessibility and inclusivity

At Augur, our culture is built on radical candor and mutual trust. To solve the complex, physical-world problems our customers face, we need a team that thinks differently.

Whether you’re self-taught, have a non-traditional background, or are returning to the workforce, if you have the grit and the experience we’re looking for at Augur, we’d love to hear from you.

We are committed to fostering a diverse workplace and ensuring an accessible hiring experience - please let us know if you require any accommodations during the interview process to help you do your best work.