Senior Backend Engineer, Data API & Low-Latency Serving

Pleo; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pleo card

Lunch provided or allowance

Comprehensive private healthcare

25 days annual leave

Hybrid/remote options

Mental health support

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Pleo is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Data Serving team, owning the boundary between raw product data and consumers including internal dashboards, AI agents, and customers themselves.

You’ll build and operate APIs, ensure low-latency reads, and collaborate with Data Engineers, Product Managers, and GenAI Platform teams. This role requires hands-on delivery with strong API design and scalable data architectures.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering experience building and owning reporting and analytics API services and serving-layer infrastructure.
• Reliability mindset with focus on latency and SLOs.
• Experience owning API boundary layers including clean endpoint design and versioning.
• Deep expertise in relational DB design, indexing, caching, and query tuning.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the Data API boundary for internal dashboards and customer-facing features.
• Design and optimize read models, indexes, and caching strategies for low latency.
• Integrate with Kotlin-based backend services to surface correct data.
• Ensure reliability and performance with monitoring, incident response, and SLOs.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs

Kotlin

PostgreSQL

Kafka

AWS/GCP

Kubernetes

SLOs

Data boundary design

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

dbt

Kotlin

BigQuery

Airflow

Job description

Pleo is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Data Serving team, owning the boundary between raw product data and consumers including internal dashboards, AI agents, and customers themselves.

You’ll build and operate APIs, ensure low-latency reads, and collaborate with Data Engineers, Product Managers, and GenAI Platform teams. This role requires hands-on delivery with strong API design and scalable data architectures.