Lead Backend Engineer

Salary: £115,000 - £130,000

Must be based in the UK

Midnite is a next-generation betting platform that is built for today's fandom. We are a collective of engineers and designers who all share a passion for building the best sports book & casino experience possible, allowing our fans to feel closer to the games they love through the rush of winning money.

Unlike the alternatives, Midnite doesn't feel like a website built two decades ago. Instead, it's a cutting‑edge creation, designed and constructed from the ground up with the latest technologies. Crafting an experience that's truly intuitive, immersive, and immediately understandable is no walk in the park, but we thrive on the challenge. We believe we're on the brink of creating something truly awesome.

We're looking for an experienced Lead Platform Software Engineer to ensure Midnite is reliable, performant, and always available, no matter the time of day. You'll play a key role in shaping the evolution of our core platform, setting engineering standards, and driving improvements across our infrastructure and backend systems.

You’ll work closely with our Head Of Platform Engineering and the UK Platform team, taking ownership of critical systems design, reliability engineering, and deployment practices. This is a high‑impact, high‑autonomy role where you’ll be the person the team relies on when things break, and the person they trust when things need to scale or improve.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. Expect to spend most of your time in the code, working alongside the team to ship production changes. You’ll also manage a small team of engineers, helping set the direction, coaching them day‑to‑day, and creating a high‑performing, engineering‑led culture. Expect meaningful ownership and to be challenged and rewarded in equal measure.

Our platform is primarily built in Python and hosted on AWS, incorporating Flask, Pytest, Mypy, Docker, Postgre

SQL, SQS, S3, and Terraform. We deploy daily.

• Own and drive architectural decisions across the platform, focusing on uptime, resilience, scalability, and performance
• Lead technical design for complex cross‑team projects, especially those touching core infrastructure or platform reliability
• Identify and drive improvements in deployment pipelines, observability, performance monitoring, and systems architecture
• Anticipate failure points, plan for scaling, and ensure the platform remains robust as usage grows
• Guide the adoption of best practices in platform engineering, reliability, testing, and operational excellence
• Work closely with partners and vendors to integrate their products into our systems in a safe, repeatable, and scalable way
• Support senior engineers in unblocking cross‑team issues, acting as the technical escalation point
• You’ll regularly contribute code, reviews, and production changes as part of the team's daily delivery

You’ll collaborate with product, design, backend, frontend, and trading teams to ensure platform decisions support Midnite's ambitions.

• Manage and develop a small team of engineers, creating the environment for them to perform at a high level
• Mentor engineers across the broader team, helping them improve technical depth, delivery capability, and decision making
• Facilitate technical discussions and planning sessions, ensuring clarity, alignment, and pragmatic decision‑making
• Delegate effectively, enabling others to move fast while ensuring engineering standards remain high
• Drive accountability and ownership across the Platform team, defining how we build, deploy, and maintain our systems
• Play a key role in hiring by running technical interviews and shaping the make‑up of the Platform function
• Strengthen the culture across engineering, promoting a focus on reliability, quality, and continuous improvement

• 7+ years of engineering experience with deep expertise in Python and cloud‑based systems
• Proven experience leading or managing engineers in a platform, backend, or infrastructure‑focused role
• Strong background in building resilient, scalable, and high‑performance distributed systems
• Ability to break down ambiguous and…