Senior Backend Engineer

Plentific; Greater London; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days annual holiday

Fully remote working

Private healthcare

Life insurance

Job summary

Plentific is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join cross-functional product teams, building the services behind repairs, quoting, invoicing, payments, contractor search, and messaging. You’ll work with Python, Django, DRF, and FastAPI on AWS/Kubernetes, ensuring reliability and data integrity in a high-volume, distributed system.

AI-assisted development and spec-driven design are part of the role, with emphasis on security, testing, and scalable architecture across Europe.

Qualifications

• Expert-level Python and Django, with strong object-oriented design and software engineering fundamentals.
• Strong command of API design, service-oriented architecture, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Expert-level relational data modelling, including ERDs, entities, relationships, constraints, and PostgreSQL schemas.
• Turn incomplete product requirements into clear technical solution designs for complex backend changes.
• Sound judgement around automated testing, observability, production reliability, security, and data integrity.
• Strong working fluency with agentic coding tools and spec-driven development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, and data pipelines using Python, Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, and related tooling.
• Design service boundaries, API contracts, relational data models, and integration flows for complex operations; produce ERDs and diagrams.
• Develop asynchronous workflows using Celery and Redis.
• Write complex SQL, evolve PostgreSQL schemas safely, and optimise performance.
• Review, refactor, and retire existing code for maintainability and new requirements.
• Write automated tests and integrate into CI/CD for reliable releases.
• Instrument services with logs, metrics, traces, and alerts for observability.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineers to translate product behaviour into technical designs.

Skills

Python

Django

API design

Distributed systems

Asynchronous processing

Testing & CI/CD

Cross-functional teams

Tools

Django REST Framework

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

Redis

Celery

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

About Us

Plentific is a property technology platform used by housing providers, local authorities, housing associations, asset managers, and contractors across the UK and Germany to coordinate repairs, maintenance, and contractor workflows at scale. The platform combines a marketplace, workflow automation, and operational analytics, and is built to handle the volume and compliance demands of social housing, local authority property portfolios, and large-scale residential operations.

We are headquartered in London and our team works across Europe.
We are growing the team to expand the platform's coverage across Europe and to integrate AI throughout the product and operating model. If you are interested in working on hard, real-world problems in a sector that has long been under-served by good software, we would like to hear from you.

The Role

This is a hands-on, fully remote role in one of Plentific's cross-functional product engineering teams. The Senior Backend Engineer works alongside product managers, frontend engineers, quality engineers, and other backend engineers to build and operate the services behind repairs, quoting and invoicing, payments, contractor search, messaging, notifications, and fraud prevention. The role is open across the European countries where we currently employ or engage remote engineers.

Our backend is built primarily in Python and Django, with Django REST Framework and FastAPI supporting APIs in a service-oriented architecture deployed on AWS and Kubernetes. PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery underpin data-intensive and asynchronous workflows. The systems handle complex permissions, legacy integrations, high transaction volumes, and business processes where reliability and data correctness matter.

AI-assisted, spec-driven development is part of normal engineering practice at Plentific. The Senior Backend Engineer turns product requirements into implementation-ready specifications, uses agentic coding tools across implementation, testing, review, and documentation, and remains accountable for the resulting software. AI-generated output is held to the same standard as human-written code. Success means delivering reliable services, improving the codebase and engineering practice around the role, and enabling the wider team to ship confidently at pace.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Engineering

• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, and data pipelines using Python, Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, and related platform tooling.

• Design service boundaries, API contracts, relational data models, and integration flows for complex property operations. Produce ERDs and other technical diagrams where they make relationships, ownership, and system behaviour easier to review.

• Develop asynchronous and event-driven workflows using technologies such as Celery and Redis.

• Write complex SQL, evolve PostgreSQL schemas safely, and optimise database performance where customer experience or operational throughput depends on it.

• Review, refactor, and retire existing code so it remains readable, testable, maintainable, and suitable for new product requirements.

Quality, Reliability, and Operations

• Write automated tests at the appropriate level and integrate them into CI/CD so changes can be released with clear evidence of quality.

• Instrument services with logs, metrics, traces, and alerts that make production behaviour and failures easy to understand.

• Diagnose and resolve production incidents across services, databases, queues, integrations, and infrastructure.

• Design for security, resilience, performance, and data integrity across business-critical workflows.

Agentic and Spec-Driven Development

• Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, and quality engineers to turn agreed product behaviour into implementation-ready technical solution designs covering assumptions, alternatives, service interactions, data and schema changes, failure modes, security, observability, rollout, rollback, and tests.

• Use agentic coding tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent to generate, refactor, test, review, and document code within clear technical constraints.

• Evaluate AI-generated code critically for correctness, maintainability, security, performance, and fit with Plentific's architecture.

• Break specifications into small, reviewable changes and validate each change against its intended behaviour before release.

• Improve the team's spec-driven development practice through reusable patterns, review checklists, examples, and concise documentation.

Delivery and Collaboration

• Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, quality engineers, and other backend engineers from problem framing through release and production operation.

• Surface technical risks and trade-offs early, and propose pragmatic changes to scope, design, or delivery plans.

• Review code and technical designs, setting a high bar while giving feedback that helps other engineers improve.

• Coach mid-level and junior engineers through pairing, code review, debugging, and design discussion.

Requirements

• Expert-level Python and Django, with strong object-oriented design and software engineering fundamentals.

• Strong command of API design, service-oriented architecture, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing.

• Expert-level relational data modelling, including the ability to produce clear ERDs, define entities, relationships, constraints, and ownership, and design PostgreSQL schemas that balance correctness, performance, and safe evolution.

• Demonstrable ability to turn incomplete product requirements into clear technical solution designs for complex backend changes, identifying assumptions and resolving ambiguity with product and engineering colleagues through concise written analysis and appropriate architecture, sequence, data-flow, and entity-relationship diagrams.

• Sound judgement around automated testing, observability, production reliability, security, and data integrity.

• Strong working fluency with agentic coding tools and spec-driven development workflows, including specification writing, code generation, test generation, and critical review.

• Demonstrable ability to review technical designs and code, explain trade-offs, and coach less-experienced engineers.

• Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts and delivery risks in plain English.

• Pragmatic delivery judgement, balancing immediate product needs with the maintainability and scalability of a long-lived platform.

• High ambition and a strong sense of urgency, with the drive to deliver an ambitious product roadmap at pace using AI, and a positive, can-do attitude.

Experience and Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial commercial experience in Python and Django.

• Experience building and operating Django-based services in production on AWS and Kubernetes.

• Experience with Django REST Framework or FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Track record of designing and safely evolving complex relational data models in a large, long-lived production codebase, using ERDs and written technical designs to align engineers and stakeholders while preserving design quality, testability, maintainability, and safe evolution.

• Experience working in cross-functional product teams with shared ownership of customer outcomes and production operation.

• Experience using AI coding tools in a professional software delivery workflow, ideally within a spec-driven development framework.

Benefits

We offer:

• 25 days annual holiday, plus one additional day for every year served, up to a maximum of 5 additional days

• Fully remote working, including the option to work abroad

• Private healthcare for you and your immediate family, with discounted gym membership and access to optical, dental, and private GP services

• Enhanced parental leave

• Life insurance at 4× salary

• Employee assistance programme

• Company volunteering day and charity salary-sacrifice scheme

• Learning management system powered by Udemy

• Referral bonus and charity donation when someone you introduce joins the company

• Season ticket loan, Cycle to Work, electric vehicle, and Techscheme programmes

• Pension scheme

• Company-sponsored dinners and social gatherings

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