Senior Backend Engineer

Inspire People; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 72,000 - 88,000; Full time

Job summary

Inspire People, in collaboration with the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST), seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build and operate reliable cloud platform services supporting critical UK digital products.

You will develop tooling, automation and CI/CD capabilities, implement SRE practices, and mentor engineers in a hybrid role with 2–3 days in the office across eligible UK locations including Belfast.

Qualifications

• Experience writing clean, maintainable code in at least one programming language.
• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user outcomes.
• Experience building and supporting applications in containerised environments.
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to build effective relationships across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience with Python or another object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, or Go is welcomed.
• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering practices is beneficial.
• Desirable experience with Python and Django, AWS and Azure, Terraform, Docker, ECS and ECR, PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS), Redis/ElastiCache, GitHub Actions, CodePipeline and CodeBuild, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Datadog/Logstash.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate reliable, secure and scalable cloud platform services supporting critical digital products.
• Develop and maintain platform tooling, automation, observability, monitoring and CI/CD capabilities.
• Build software solutions using Python and modern engineering practices.
• Write clean, maintainable code and infrastructure-as-code solutions to support service delivery.
• Embed Site Reliability Engineering principles including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and continual service improvement.
• Support live service operations, incident management, troubleshooting and platform resilience.
• Collaborate with engineers, architects, product teams and stakeholders while coaching and mentoring colleagues.

Skills

Programming experience

Distributed systems design

Containerised environments

Linux fundamentals

Communication

Python or Java/C#/Go

Site Reliability Engineering

Cloud services

Tools

AWS

OpenSearch

Azure

Django

Docker

GitHub

Terraform

PostgreSQL

Redis

Datadog

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

CodePipeline/CodeBuild

Python

Job description

Salary: £80,000 - 80,000 per year

Requirements

• Experience writing clean, maintainable code in at least one programming language.
• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user outcomes.
• Experience building and supporting applications in containerised environments.
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to build effective relationships across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience with Python or another object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, or Go is welcomed.
• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering practices is beneficial.
• Desirable experience with Python and Django, AWS and Azure, Terraform, Docker, ECS and ECR, PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS), Redis/ElastiCache, GitHub Actions, CodePipeline and CodeBuild, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Datadog/Logstash.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate reliable, secure and scalable cloud platform services supporting critical digital products.
• Develop and maintain platform tooling, automation, observability, monitoring and CI/CD capabilities.
• Build software solutions using Python and modern engineering practices.
• Write clean, maintainable code and infrastructure-as-code solutions to support service delivery.
• Embed Site Reliability Engineering principles including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and continual service improvement.
• Support live service operations, incident management, troubleshooting and platform resilience.
• Collaborate with engineers, architects, product teams and stakeholders while coaching and mentoring colleagues.

Technologies

• AWS
• OpenSearch
• Azure
• Backend
• C#
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Datadog
• Django
• Docker
• ElasticSearch
• GitHub
• Incident Management
• Support
• Java
• Linux
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• Redis
• Security
• TCP/IP
• Terraform
• Unix

More

We are Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST), in partnership with Inspire People, and we are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help build and operate reliable, scalable and secure digital services that support UK businesses and trade. Our Digital, Data and Technology directorate develops and operates the tools and services that support our mission. This permanent Grade 7 role can be based in London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham or Salford, with hybrid working of 2-3 days per week in the office, flexible working options and a salary of £63,824 to £80,158, rising to £83,778 for London, including allowances dependent on location and technical skills assessed at interview. We offer a flexible working culture, full-time, part-time and flexible working options, tailored learning and development, a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%, 25 days annual leave rising to 30 days with service, three paid volunteering days each year, an inclusive and diverse working culture, and an employee benefits programme including Cycle to Work. This is an opportunity to help shape the reliability, security and performance of critical digital services while scaling our global platform and strengthening engineering practices across the organisation. Our Digital, Data and Technology team was nominated four consecutive times for Best Public Sector Employer at the Women in Tech Employer Awards and won the award in 2025.

last updated 36 week of 2026