Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure

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

Job summary

A leading company seeks a backend-focused engineer to join their team remotely. This role involves optimizing a high-throughput reporting platform, collaborating with various engineers, and designing efficient data pipelines. Seeking candidates with strong Ruby expertise, MySQL experience, and a track record in backend systems to help manage millions of transactions globally.

Benefits

Massive visible impact

Start-to-finish ownership

Opportunity to work on distributed systems

Collaboration with founders

Qualifications

• 5+ years building high-throughput backend systems.
• Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise required.
• AWS production experience (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC) preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize the distributed reporting engine.
• Profile and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
• Expose GraphQL/REST contracts for accounting tools.

Skills

Ruby/Rails

MySQL

AWS

Data Integrity

API Development

Job description

Social network you want to login/join with:

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Client:

INDY

Location:

shrewsbury, United Kingdom

Job Category:

Other

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EU work permit required:

Yes

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Job Views:

3

Posted:

06.06.2025

Expiry Date:

21.07.2025

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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

Nice-to-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.