Platform Engineer — Backend Systems & Scaling

36 Labs; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

36 Labs is seeking a backend-focused engineer to own our core platform, including deployment, service communication, job orchestration, and the databases that power our products.

You'll shape the platform's infrastructure, work with the CTO on architecture, collaborate with ML and content engineers, and drive scalable, observable systems as we scale throughput and introduce a robust workflow layer.

Qualifications

• BSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or equivalent experience.
• Production Python and TypeScript experience required.
• 4+ years building and running backend systems in production.
• Sound judgment on idempotency, retries, back-off, concurrency and parallelism.
• Strong experience running PostgreSQL in production, including schema design and migrations.
• Led infrastructure from scratch and at least one major migration.
• End-to-end ownership of infrastructure: containers, CI/CD, networking, observability, incidents.
• Led technical work: set direction, reviewed designs, mentored in teams.

Responsibilities

• Design system architecture: service boundaries, data and API contracts, and service-to-service communication.
• Lead the migration from Railway to Cloudflare with minimal disruption to production workloads.
• Own deployments and production health across services: CI/CD, environments, rollbacks, secrets, observability, alerts and runbooks.
• Own the scheduler, queues and sandboxes for long-running workflows with end-to-end traceability and cost efficiency.
• Build reliable, well-documented internal APIs that other teams can build on top of.
• Own the data platform, including schema design and migrations at scale.
• Set the standard for backend engineering and guide the software factory toward high-quality, fast shipping.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Backend architecture

CI/CD

Architecture

Education

BSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics

Tools

PostgreSQL

Docker

GitHub Actions

Job description

36 Labs is seeking a backend-focused engineer to own our core platform, including deployment, service communication, job orchestration, and the databases that power our products.

You'll shape the platform's infrastructure, work with the CTO on architecture, collaborate with ML and content engineers, and drive scalable, observable systems as we scale throughput and introduce a robust workflow layer.