Principal Backend Engineer – Payments Platform (Hybrid)

Candour; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Company pension

Career development support

Holiday allowance

Job summary

Candour is seeking an experienced Principal Backend Engineer to join our growing engineering team in Manchester, building a high-performance payments platform. This hands-on role combines software development with technical leadership across architecture, standards, code quality, and best practices.

You’ll own features from design to deployment, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cloud, data and AI tooling teams to deliver reliable systems.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience with Java, Kotlin or Scala.
• Experience designing and building backend/distributed systems.
• Strong experience with event-driven and asynchronous architectures.
• Strong database experience (PostgreSQL/MySQL/SQL Server/DynamoDB/Cosmos DB).
• Experience integrating third-party services and APIs.
• Understanding testing, version control, CI/CD and secure coding practices.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical standards.
• Ability to work autonomously with ownership.
• Fluency with AI coding tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship high-quality backend features.
• Work with asynchronous and event-driven systems.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to engineers.
• Make architectural and technical decisions.
• Write clean, secure, well-tested code.
• Review code and establish engineering standards.
• Build and maintain automated tests and CI/CD pipelines.
• Integrate third-party services and APIs.
• Collaborate with cloud/platform engineers for reliable systems.
• Leverage AI coding tools in daily development.
• Support team in adopting AI-assisted development.
• Own features through full software lifecycle.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Scala

Backend development

Event-driven architecture

Distributed systems

AI coding tools

Git / VCS

CI/CD

Tools

PostgreSQL

MySQL

SQL Server

DynamoDB

Cosmos DB

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Candour is seeking an experienced Principal Backend Engineer to join our growing engineering team in Manchester, building a high-performance payments platform. This hands-on role combines software development with technical leadership across architecture, standards, code quality, and best practices.

You’ll own features from design to deployment, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cloud, data and AI tooling teams to deliver reliable systems.