Software Engineer - Backend

Salary banding: £55,000 - £75,000 dependent on experience

Working pattern: Hybrid; 1-2 days per week in the office

Location: London

As a business which has AI at its core, we need to have a reliable, scalable and secure real-time ML platform to deliver our product to customers. The Engineering team makes this happen.

The team is UK-based, with a significant contingent in London, and is made up of pragmatic, curious and collaborative problem-solvers who are passionate about working with our Data Scientists to build state of the art AI products. Our Software Engineers bring together a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds; what unites us is a desire to learn, a mastery of our discipline and strong technical prowess.

Our engineers are responsible for all aspects of the software development lifecycle. You will get the opportunity to work across our entire stack building features which deliver AI capabilities to some of the biggest names in the insurance industry.

We are developing a modern real-time ML platform using technologies like FastAPI, PyTorch, Ray, k8s (helm + flux), Terraform, Postgres, Flink on AWS, React & Typescript. We operate a fully Python stack except for frontend and infrastructure code. We are very big fans of Infrastructure-as-Code and enjoy Agile practices.

As a team, we're driven by a relentless focus on delivering real value to customers  embrace modern engineering practices such as automated testing, continuous monitoring, feature flags, and on-demand production-like environments to support frequent, reliable releases.

Our team is tackling several exciting challenges, including:

• Deploying all changes, including complex machine learning models, reliably to customers within 15 minutes
• Building a real-time, configuration-driven platform that seamlessly adapts to diverse customer needs
• Ensuring autoscaling and cost-efficient model serving in production, with robust support for ML monitoring and experimentation
• Centralised reporting/metrics for both the business and our customers
• Powering user experience of internal and external users through agentic workflows

We are looking for an engineer passionate about developer enablement and infrastructure as code, who is eager to expand their expertise by contributing to impactful product features. You'll play a key role in improving the lives of millions of insurance policyholders globally, working with a modern and powerful technology stack that includes:

• Python for application development
• Terraform for AWS infrastructure provisioning
• Kubernetes (with Helm and Flux) for managing services
• Git Lab for CI/CD and version control
• AWS as our infrastructure platform
• PostgreSQL for application data and event sourcing architecture
• Apache Flink for real-time service interactions and state management

• Collaborate with Engineers, Product Managers, and the Engagement team to understand problem spaces, contribute to solution design, and support the development of our product.
• Take responsibility for maintaining and improving parts of our backend stack, following engineering best practices.
• Write robust and well-tested code, including unit, integration, and end-to-end automated tests for backend services that power customer-facing features.
• Participate in code reviews, share feedback with peers, and stay informed about emerging backend technologies and patterns.
• Contribute to platform-related work, using infrastructure-as-code tools (AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes) to help keep our systems reliable and scalable.
• Support the growth of the team by sharing knowledge and collaborating closely with engineers and data scientists.
• Help improve engineering workflows and contribute ideas for refining team processes and delivery methods.
• Play a role in feature rollouts by using feature flags, monitoring metrics, and responding to logs and alerts.
• Embody and promote the Engineering and Sprout company values in your day-to-day work.

• Technical proficiency
• Solid proficiency in software architecture using Python and FastAPI.
• Experience working in fully cloud-hosted environments (e.g. AWS).
• Solid RDBMS experience, preferably with PostgreSQL
• Experience building RESTful APIs (e.g. FastAPI) and real-time data processing pipelines
• Bonus points for experience with Kubernetes, Apache Flink, Flux or Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks (e.g. Terraform).
• Experience of maintaining your own code in a production environment.
• A good foundational understanding of modern software development life cycles, including code quality, pull requests, code reviews, CI/CD, QA, and production releases in an agile, fast-paced environment
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to think critically and creatively
• Collaborative by nature, with excellent communication and teamwork abilities
• Self-motivated, with a strong sense of ownership and accountability

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