Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure

JR United Kingdom; Oxford; Remote; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A groundbreaking technology company, INDY, seeks a backend-focused engineer to manage their reporting platform. The role involves optimizing large MySQL schemas, enhancing data pipelines, and developing APIs. Ideal candidates should have strong experience in backend systems with Ruby on Rails, AWS, and a passion for data integrity and performance optimization.

Benefits

Impact millions of moviegoers

Own projects end-to-end

Collaborative environment with domain experts

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Ruby/Rails

Data Ingestion

MySQL Optimization

AWS

API Development

Tools

Sidekiq

ClickHouse

Redshift

BigQuery

Kafka

Kinesis

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 annually across cinemas worldwide, with a nimble team where each engineer’s work is impactful across six continents.

Role Purpose:

Our reporting platform is the analytical backbone of INDY, decomposing queries into thousands of parallel Sidekiq jobs and delivering results in seconds. We seek a backend-focused engineer to:

• Own and improve this distributed reporting engine.
• Design data pipelines for efficient ingestion and querying of transactional data.
• Collaborate with front-end engineers integrating APIs into Vue dashboards.

Responsibilities:

• Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
• Tune Sidekiq queues, worker pools, and EC2 autoscaling for variable loads.
• Refactor long-running jobs into idempotent, parallelizable units.
• Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills to maintain data integrity.
• Instrument metrics and alerts for throughput, latency, and cost monitoring.
• Develop APIs (GraphQL/REST) for accounting tools and introduce abstractions for rapid report development.
• Work with infrastructure teams on AWS resources, collaborate with front-end developers, and advise on data models.

Ideal Candidate:

• 5+ years in high-throughput backend systems.
• Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores.
• Deep expertise in Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord.
• Familiarity with ClickHouse, Redshift, BigQuery, Kafka, Kinesis.
• Experience with AWS services (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC).
• Contributions to OSS or technical blogging on performance.

Goals (6-12 months):

• Reduce report-generation latency by 50%, despite data volume growth.
• Implement zero-downtime schema migrations and automate backfills.
• Deploy initial studio-settlement APIs for finance.
• Proactively surface scaling issues via dashboards and alerts.

Why Join INDY:

• Impact millions of moviegoers through your work.
• Own projects end-to-end with minimal bureaucracy.
• Engage with distributed computing and financial data correctness.
• Work closely with founders and domain experts in a collaborative environment.