Lead Engineer II - Backend; Python

Best Egg, now part of Barclays, is a market‑leading, tech‑enabled financial platform helping people build financial confidence through innovative lending solutions and financial health tools. As a Barclays company, we combine the agility and customer focus of a fintech with the global reach, stability, and purpose of a leading financial institution—working together to create a better financial future for our customers and communities.

At Best Egg, you’ll find a culture grounded in our core values—putting people first, creating clarity, delivering with excellence, and leading with heart—enhanced by Barclays’ commitment to integrity, inclusion, and long‑term impact. Together, we empower our colleagues to challenge, innovate, and take ownership while making a meaningful difference in people’s financial lives.

With the strength of Barclays behind us, we offer expanded opportunities for growth, development, and career mobility across a global organization—while continuing to build the products and experiences that make Best Egg unique.

We’re looking for collaborative, curious problem‑solvers who are excited to make an impact and grow with us.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

The Lead Software Engineer II – Backend plays an important role in building and enhancing backend engineering solutions across the organization. This role focuses on designing and delivering reliable, high‑quality Python services on AWS while contributing to technical discussions, improving engineering practices, and supporting team execution. You will work closely with senior engineers, Product, and other backend and frontend teams to build performant, maintainable, and scalable APIs, serverless functions, and containerized services.

• Design, develop, and deliver high‑quality backend Python services iteratively and incrementally.
• Take ownership of key services and APIs—from hands‑on coding through CI/CD, deployment to AWS, monitoring, and on‑call support.
• Contribute to backend observability using tools like Datadog for logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting.
• Participate in technical design discussions and contribute architectural insights, working with senior leaders to shape solutions.
• Ensure software follows modern engineering practices, including clean code, testing, automation, and modern backend architecture patterns.
• Support continuous improvement in code quality, reliability, performance, and developer experience.
• Translate business requirements into clear technical tasks and help validate assumptions and approaches.

• 3–7 years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Python at scale, including modern Python (3.13+), type hints, async/await, packaging, and a strong grasp of the standard library and the broader ecosystem.
• Expertise with at least one major Python web framework (FastAPI preferred; Django or Flask also strong) and the patterns that make Python services reliable in production.
• Strong hands‑on experience with AWS, including building and operating production workloads on Lambda (serverless functions, event‑driven architectures) and EKS (containerized services on Kubernetes).
• Working knowledge of supporting AWS services such as API Gateway, SQS/SNS, S3, IAM, Cloud Watch, and Secrets Manager.
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs.
• Working knowledge of Postgre
  
  SQL.
• Experience with Redis for caching, rate limiting.
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and Kubernetes fundamentals (deployments, services, scaling, troubleshooting).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern release tooling; familiarity with Git Hub Actions and Octopus Deploy is a plus.
• Experience with unit, integration, and contract testing (pytest or similar).
• Experience working within mature, legacy codebases and contributing to incremental modernization efforts.

• Own core services or features.
• Deliver high‑quality, production‑ready code and contribute meaningfully to team goals.
• B…