Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure

JR United Kingdom; Cardiff; Remote; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company is searching for a backend-focused engineer to enhance its analytical reporting platform. This role involves optimizing database systems, implementing data pipelines, and collaborating across various functional teams to ensure robust data management and integrity, making a visible impact on millions of moviegoers.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building high-throughput backend systems.
• Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores.
• Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise.

Responsibilities

• Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
• Tuning Sidekiq queues and worker pools for bursty loads.
• Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.

Skills

Ruby/Rails

ActiveRecord

MySQL

AWS experience

Data visualization

Job description

Location: Remote (Global)

Core Stack: Ruby on Rails (API-only), Sidekiq, MySQL, AWS (EC2, RDS, EFS), Highcharts.js (data consumers)

About INDY:

INDY powers every operational layer of a movie theater—from ticket sales and concessions to scheduling, accounting, and real-time business intelligence. Our platform handles tens of millions of tickets a year across cinemas worldwide, yet we remain a nimble team where each engineer’s work is felt immediately in theaters on six continents.

Why This Role Exists:

Our home-grown reporting platform is the analytical backbone of INDY. It decomposes incoming queries into thousands of parallel Sidekiq jobs (hourly → daily → weekly → monthly roll-ups) and serves the results back to cinema managers in seconds. As volume soars, we need a backend-focused engineer to:

• Own and harden this distributed reporting engine.
• Design data pipelines that can ingest years of transactional data and still answer ad-hoc questions quickly.
• You will partner with—but not be accountable for—front-end engineers who wire these APIs into Vue-based dashboards.

What You’ll Do:

• Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
• Tune Sidekiq queues, worker pools, and EC2 autoscaling groups for bursty loads.
• Refactor long-running jobs into idempotent, parallelizable units.

Maintain Data Integrity & Observability:

• Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.
• Instrument metrics/alerting around throughput, latency, and cost.

Expand Administrative Workflows:

• Expose clean GraphQL/REST contracts that power accounting tools for film bookings, revenue splits, and studio payouts.
• Introduce domain-specific abstractions (DSLs, helpers) so other engineers can add new report types rapidly.

Collaborate Across Functions:

• Work with infra engineers on Terraform-managed AWS resources.
• Pair with front-end devs to ensure APIs are ergonomic and secure.
• Advise product and finance teams on data-model trade-offs.

What We’re Looking For:

• 5+ yrs building high-throughput backend systems
• Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores
• Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise
• Exposure to ClickHouse/Redshift/BigQuery
• Event-driven or stream processing (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Familiarity with data-viz pipelines (we use Highcharts.js)
• AWS production experience (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC)
• Contributions to OSS or tech-blog posts on performance

What Success Looks Like (6-12 Months):

• Daily report-generation latency cut by 50% while data volume doubles.
• Zero-downtime schema migrations and automated backfill strategy in place.
• First phase of studio-settlement APIs shipped and adopted by finance ops.
• Comprehensive dashboards/alerts proactively surface scaling limits before customers notice.

Why INDY Rocks:

• Massive Visible Impact: Your optimizations ripple out to millions of moviegoers.
• Start-to-Finish Ownership: No layers of bureaucracy; ship, measure, iterate.
• Technically Spicy: Distributed computing meets real-world financial correctness.
• Tight-Knit Crew: Collaborate directly with founders and domain experts.