Senior Backend Engineer - Payments

Depop Limited - Nova; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health + Mental Wellbeing PMI

Cycle to Work scheme

EAP for 24/7 support

Life Insurance & Pension matching

Job summary

Depop is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our Payments team on a permanent basis. You will collaborate with mobile, web, and data science squads to build scalable services handling high daily traffic.

You’ll write high-quality code in TypeScript/Scala/Java/Kotlin, work with Postgres, DynamoDB, and Kafka, and contribute to a DevOps culture. Hybrid working with dog-friendly offices is offered.

Qualifications

• Solid software engineering experience across JVM or JS stacks.
• Ability to learn Scala stack and work across paradigms.
• Experience with relational or non-relational databases.
• Experience with modern stream processing and event-driven architectures.
• Strong communication and testing proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design scalable solutions.
• Produce high-quality, maintainable code used by thousands daily.
• Own features end-to-end from discovery to deployment and support.
• Mentor teammates and participate in architectural reviews.
• Contribute to incident management and blameless post-mortems.
• Drive iterative development with A/B testing and data-driven decisions.

Skills

Code in TypeScript/Scala/Java/Kotlin

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

Kafka

Scalable web apps

DevOps culture

Independent problem solving

Product-focused mindset

AB testing

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Play framework

AWS

Job description

Company Description Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new. Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it. Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human. If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [e-mail].

Job Description

Depop is looking for an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer to join us permanently. Within this role, you’ll be working in a cross-functional Payments team in partnership with mobile, web and machine learning/data science teams to drive the team to success.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Product Designers, and various Engineers to understand problems and to design solutions
• Produce high-quality code that is well-structured and simple to understand that will be used by 1M+ active daily users
• Take ownership of product development, from feature discovery, to the breakdown of work, and its implementation
• End-to-end application support, including production incident management
• Embrace agile methodologies and user-centred thinking
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as blameless post-mortems, architecture reviews, and engineering guild sessions.
• Collaborate on a daily basis with fellow engineers in the cross functional environment to solve problems and write code
• Mentor and coach your colleagues
• Own your code, workflows and, data through their entire lifecycle

Desired experience

• Writing high quality code in TypeScript, Scala, Java, Kotlin or another JVM language
• Relational databases, ideally Postgres
• NoSQL datastores (e.g. DynamoDB)
• Stream processing: (e.g. Kafka)
• Experience building scalable web applications serving 10,000s of requests per second
• DevOps culture
• Ability to proactively find and solve complex problems independently, but also know when to seek guidance or help from your peers.
• Product-oriented mindset with a focus on solving real business problems rather than over-engineering solutions.
• Experience with iterative development using A/B testing

Must haves

• Solid software engineering experience.
• Strong evidence that you can learn our Scala stack effectively.
• We use TypeScript and Scala.
• Willing to work across multiple paradigms and languages, such as backend or data work, using Scala and Python.
• Strong technical and non-technical communication skills
• Proficient in testing solutions at different levels, unit and integration
• Experience with relational or non-relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL and DynamoDB
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar

Bonus points

• Experience with payment SDKs (Stripe, PayPal, or similar)
• Experience in marketplace or fintech environments
• Experience with Play framework
• Experience with eCommerce
• Experience with event-driven architectures, preferably using Kafka
• Experience in using production AWS infrastructure, ideally with Terraform
• Experience with Python
• Experience with data engineering
• A genuine curiosity about AI and a willingness to explore how it can enhance your day-to-day work

Additional Information

• Health + Mental Wellbeing PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting
• Work/Life Balance: 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options*role-dependent All offices are dog-friendly
• Family Life: For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave
• Learn + Grow: Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews Learning budget Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary) Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!

Want to learn more about life at Depop? We share life at Depop updates on our LinkedIn page, and you can also keep an eye on all our job opportunities on our careers page.