Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure

JR United Kingdom; Exeter; Remote; GBP 50,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in the cinema technology sector seeks a backend-focused engineer to optimize its reporting platform. This role involves developing data pipelines, managing MySQL schemas, and collaborating on AWS infrastructure, ensuring data integrity for global cinema operations. Join a tight-knit team where impactful changes reach millions of moviegoers.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Own and harden the distributed reporting engine.
• Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
• Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.

Skills

High-throughput backend systems

Ruby/Rails expertise

Data visualization

AWS production experience

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:

Must-Have:

• 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.