Staff Backend Engineer

Depop Limited - Nova; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare plan

Counselling service

Cycle to Work scheme

Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)

Parental leave (birth)

Sabbatical after 5 years

Hybrid/Remote options (role-dependent)

Life Insurance & Pension matching

Job summary

Depop is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to act as a connective force across Payments and Shipping, owning architectural vision and driving cross-team execution.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical strategy, and partner with senior leadership to align initiatives and deliver high-impact outcomes across multiple squads.

Qualifications

• Experience in a senior technical leadership role spanning backend systems at scale.
• Willingness to learn payments and shipping domains across teams.
• Track record of unblocking cross-team initiatives and driving alignment without direct authority.
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale.
• Strong knowledge of event-driven architectures and tradeoffs in large systems.
• Ability to balance hands-on delivery with strategic influence.
• Excellent communication skills to align engineers and non-technical leaders.

Responsibilities

• Operate across team boundaries to tackle high-impact cross-cutting problems.
• Connect dots between teams, surface dependencies and architectural drift.
• Partner with senior leadership to translate strategy into cross-team plans.
• Lead cross-functional projects spanning multiple squads and stakeholders.
• Provide hands-on leadership and code when needed to unblock teams.
• Champion engineering excellence and standardize technical practices.
• Mentor engineers across squads and raise the technical bar.

Skills

Staff leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Distributed systems design

Event-driven architectures (Kafka)

Hands-on coding

Architectural judgment

Effective communication

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]

In 2026 our ambition is to be a high-performing, delivery-focused organisation and the best engineering organisation for those who value meaningful career growth. We're looking for a UK-based Staff Backend Engineer to act as a connective force across Depop's Payments and Shipping domains, two of our most interdependent, highest-stakes systems. Over time you'll build a deep, genuine understanding of our stack across both spaces, deep enough to make informed, high-leverage technical decisions. We want someone who builds mastery by working across boundaries, and who'd rather understand how the whole system fits together than own one deep, isolated slice of it. You'll work as the technical right hand to the Director overseeing this space, helping translate strategic intent into cross-team execution, and stepping in wherever the hardest, most cross-cutting problems live. You should be equally comfortable diving into a squad's architecture for a week to unblock a specific problem, and stepping back to spot a pattern across three different teams that no single squad owns. You'll own and drive technical vision that spans team boundaries, and you'll be judged as much on the connections you make and the alignment you build as on any one system you ship.

Responsibilities

• Operate across team boundaries rather than being anchored to one squad, going wherever the highest-impact cross-cutting problem is.
• Connect the dots between teams working in adjacent parts of the system, surfacing dependencies, duplicated effort, or architectural drift before they become expensive.
• Partner directly with the senior leadership as a trusted technical thought partner, helping shape strategy, then translating it into concrete cross-team technical plans.
• Lead cross-functional projects that touch multiple squads, product managers, and stakeholders, driving them to delivery even when no single team owns the outcome.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and architectural judgment wherever it's needed most, including writing code yourself when that's the fastest way to unblock a team.
• Champion engineering excellence and consistent technical standards across teams that may otherwise diverge.
• Mentor and coach engineers across multiple squads, raising the technical bar broadly rather than within a single team.
• Identify complex, cross-team technical challenges and bottlenecks, and drive them to resolution.

Qualifications

You’ll be an excellent fit if you have:

• Experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role, operating across backend systems at scale.
• Deep payments or shipping domain expertise going in is not required, but you should be genuinely motivated to build it by working across both.
• A track record of working across team boundaries: connecting people, unblocking cross-team initiatives, and driving alignment without formal authority.
• Deep expertise designing, building, and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale, in any domain
• Strong Familiarity with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka) and the tradeoffs of distributed systems at scale.
• Strong judgment on when to go deep versus when to zoom out: you can flex between hands-on delivery and strategic influence.
• Excellent communication skills; you can explain technical tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical leaders with equal clarity, and build consensus across teams that don't naturally agree.
• A genuine curiosity about systems outside your own — you actively seek out how the pieces fit together rather than staying in your lane.

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-Base, 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!

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 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.