Senior Backend Engineer: Architect Data Pipelines & APIs

Publicis Media; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension

Life Assurance

Private Medical cover

Flexible benefits

Job summary

Publicis Media is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to lead design, development, and evolution of backend systems and data pipelines across OneSuite. You will write production-grade code, solve complex distributed systems challenges, shape backend patterns, and mentor engineers on technical excellence.

You will define service architecture, enforce best practices, and collaborate across teams to ensure scalable, reliable, secure, and performant backend systems supporting Search, Social, and

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience with architectural ownership over services or distributed systems.
• Expertise in Python, FastAPI, and Flask with modern backend development patterns.
• Strong understanding of microservices, concurrency, async programming, and event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, MongoDB).
• Experience with PySpark and Databricks, including medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold).
• Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) and Docker/Kubernetes.
• CI/CD experience using GitHub Actions, Argo, or similar tools.
• Observability—logs, metrics, traces, and performance analysis.

Responsibilities

• Architect distributed backend services and APIs using Python, FastAPI, or equivalent frameworks.
• Design modular, observable, and scalable backend components for orchestration, data pipelines, and platform integrations.
• Define patterns for microservices, domain boundaries, caching, queuing, resiliency, and error handling.
• Build robust service-to-service communication mechanisms (REST, gRPC, event-driven patterns).
• Implement secure authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and multi-tenant access controls.
• Design and maintain data pipelines using PySpark and Databricks, following the medallion architecture.
• Build and optimize ETL/ELT workflows ingesting and serving marketing performance data at scale.
• Collaborate with analytics and data science teams to ensure well-modeled data assets.
• Implement data quality checks, schema enforcement, and lineage tracking across stages.
• Write high-quality, production-ready code and integrate with external APIs.
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code environments.
• Lead code reviews and mentor engineers to uphold standards.
• Contribute to backend SDKs and internal libraries and frameworks.
• Partner with SRE to define SLIs/SLOs and improve reliability.
• Work with product, data, and SRE teams on backend designs across domains.
• Align architecture decisions for consistency and maintainability.

Skills

Python

FastAPI

Flask

Microservices

Async programming

SQL

NoSQL

Databricks

PySpark

Docker/Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Argo

CloudFormation

Job description

Publicis Media is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to lead design, development, and evolution of backend systems and data pipelines across OneSuite. You will write production-grade code, solve complex distributed systems challenges, shape backend patterns, and mentor engineers on technical excellence.

You will define service architecture, enforce best practices, and collaborate across teams to ensure scalable, reliable, secure, and performant backend systems supporting Search, Social, and