Full Stack Engineer, Platform Reliability

Sperry Rail, Inc.; East Midlands; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Sperry Rail, Inc. is seeking a versatile Full Stack Engineer to build and run the platform behind our inspection products.

You will work across the stack—Python services and AWS infrastructure at the back, React at the front—owning reliability and resilience from day one. You will triage problems, drive root-cause analysis, and implement changes that stop recurring failures, while collaborating with inspection engineers, data scientists, and product managers to deliver robust, scalable software

Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Python for backend development.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain backend services, APIs, and microservices using Python.

Skills

Python

React

AWS

SQL

RESTful APIs

TypeScript

Git

CI/CD

Docker

ECS/Fargate

Terraform

CloudFormation

CDK

CloudWatch

Grafana

Datadog

Observability

Incident management

NDT/rail testing

Tools

AWS (cloud services)

Docker

Terraform

CDK

CloudFormation

Grafana

Datadog

CloudWatch

ECS/Fargate

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Full Stack Engineer, Platform Reliability

About Sperry:

Sperry Rail is on a mission-critical journey to revolutionize the Rail Flaw Detection industry. Through the continuous development of cutting-edge diagnostic technologies and AI-assisted analysis, we are transforming railway safety worldwide. Our global engineering teams work collaboratively to develop step-change technologies that define Sperry as the unparalleled market leader.

For nearly a century, we have repeatedly modernized and improved rail diagnostics through our relentless pursuit of improvement. Determined is an understatement. We are obsessed with advancing science and raising the bar on what’s possible with our ever-improving suite of products and service offerings.

Emboldened through the shared values of honesty, accountability, passion, integrity, and teamwork, we are driven by the challenge and bridging concepts with fruition. Each technologist entering Sperry imprints themselves into our brand and further galvanizes a culture of innovation and advancement. Allow us to be clear, Thought Leaders are welcome!

We are agile and hungry and invite those with similar passions to join us in challenging the status quo and bringing new ideas to the market. Fast-paced, high-touch with a distinct sense of purpose. We offer more than a job; we offer an opportunity to be part of something different.

Role Summary

We are hiring a versatile Full Stack Engineer to build and run the platform behind Sperry's inspection products. You will work across the stack – Python services and AWS infrastructure at the back, React at the front – moving between projects as priorities shift, and you will own the reliability and resilience of what we ship alongside the features you add to it. We have put build and run in the same seat on purpose. The engineers who keep a platform dependable are the ones closest to how it is actually used, and that puts you in front of the analysts, inspection engineers, and customers who depend on it daily. You will triage the interesting problems, work them to root cause, help specify the changes that stop them recurring, and then build those changes. It is the fastest way to learn a genuinely complex domain, and it carries real influence over where the product goes next.

What We Expect From You

We expect an exceptional level of drive and ambition. You think beyond today's work to what the team and organization need next, champion bold ideas, and see them through. Your hunger is infectious – it inspires those around you to aim higher. You should be someone who puts the team first. You share credit openly, admit when you are wrong, and welcome feedback as an opportunity to grow. You are comfortable saying "I don't know" and asking for help when needed. Strong interpersonal skills are important for this role. You should have good instincts for working with different people, listen actively, navigate disagreements constructively, and communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences. You should be comfortable working independently on most tasks, planning your own work within a sprint or project, and making sound day-to-day decisions without needing approval. You will seek input on significant design or architectural choices but otherwise operate with autonomy. This work rewards a particular temperament. You stay calm when a production system is misbehaving, you are methodical about finding the actual cause rather than the first plausible one, and you write down what you learned so the next person does not have to rediscover it.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain backend services, APIs, and microservices using Python
• Build and maintain frontend applications and user interfaces using React
• Design and implement cloud-native solutions on AWS (Lambda, EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, API Gateway)
• Own the reliability and resilience of the platform: monitoring, alerting, and the engineering work that removes recurring failure
• Be a first point of contact for the people who use our systems, triaging what comes in and working to defined incident severities and response times
• Investigate problems through to root cause and drive fixes to closure, including the design changes that stop them happening again
• Help specify new features and improvements, informed by what you see failing and what users ask for
• Improve the documentation, stability, and supportability of the systems you work on
• Support and contribute to multiple projects across the engineering team
• Write automated tests and maintain CI/CD pipelines
• Collaborate with stakeholders to gather requirements and deliver solutions
• Write clean, tested, well-documented code following engineering best practices
• Participate in code reviews, sprint planning, and technical design discussions
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including inspection engineers, data scientists, and product managers
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Python for backend development
• Experience with React (hooks, state management, component architecture)
• Experience with AWS cloud services and cloud-native architecture
• Solid understanding of SQL and relational and non-relational databases
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs
• Familiarity with modern frontend tooling (TypeScript, Webpack/Vite, CSS frameworks)
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, including on systems you did not write
• Ability to context-switch across multiple projects and priorities
• Familiarity with version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and agile development practices
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to learn new technologies quickly
• Good communication skills – able to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• A collaborative, team-first mindset aligned with our values of being Humble, Hungry, and Smart
• Experience working to formal incident management and SLA frameworks, and improving them
• Experience with observability and monitoring tooling (CloudWatch, Grafana, Datadog, or similar)
• Experience picking up an unfamiliar codebase and making it dependable
• Experience in rail testing, NDT, or sensor-based inspection industries (ultrasound, eddy current, electromagnetic, etc.)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform)
• Knowledge of containerization (Docker, ECS/Fargate)