Senior Backend Engineer - Matching

Overview

Depop is looking for an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Better Matching Experiences (BMX) team permanently. BMX owns Depop's product discovery and personalisation experience - the highest traffic surfaces on the platform (by orders of magnitude!) and the largest user-facing surface area across Depop's engineering organisation. The team builds and evolves the search, recommendations, and personalisation platform that powers how millions of users discover inventory across the marketplace.

This is a cross-functional squad of Backend and iOS Engineers working closely with Product, Data Science, ML Scientists and Design partners, operating in a fast-moving, experiment-driven environment where user behaviour insights directly shape what we build and how we iterate. As a Senior Backend Engineer in BMX, you will have a unique opportunity to shape, evolve and scale our discovery and personalisation systems.

You will influence how we migrate to modern architectures and help establish strong engineering foundations as we accelerate new user success and continuous discovery.

• Independently design and deliver backend solutions to medium-to-large problem spaces, from discovery through production and iteration
• Build and evolve core discovery services, pipelines and APIs that power personalisation at scale
• Help improve search relevance and recommendation quality by working at the intersection of backend engineering and ML-powered personalisation
• Take end-to-end ownership of your work, including design, implementation, testing, observability, and operational support
• Contribute to shaping technical direction within the team, improving system design, reliability, and developer experience
• Operate in an experiment-led environment, helping define hypotheses, success metrics, and feedback loops
• Collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, Design, and other Engineering teams to ensure solutions are well scoped and well understood
• Actively contribute to continuous improvement through retrospectives, post-incident reviews, and technical discussions
• Mentor and support other engineers in the team, raising the overall quality of delivery

• You will shape discovery and personalisation systems that directly influence how millions of users find what they love on Depop
• You will work at the intersection of product engineering and data science
• You will have real ownership over meaningful problem areas across search, recommendations, and the personalisation platform
• You will see direct, measurable impact from your work through experiment results and user engagement metrics
• You will help drive a significant architectural evolution as we modernise our service layer
• You will join a team that values experimentation, learning, and pragmatic engineering excellence

• Experienced in backend engineering fundamentals with experience independently delivering production systems
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Scala, Java or Typescript, with the ability to learn new languages quickly
• Experience working with data-intensive systems, including designing, consuming, and evolving data models across services
• Experience building or operating event-driven systems, such as producing and consuming events or messages in distributed architectures
• Experience building scalable and reliable services and APIs
• A strong sense of ownership paired with effective collaboration and communication
• Comfort working in ambiguous problem spaces and proactively shaping solutions
• Solid testing practices across unit and integration levels
• Experience working in a Dev Ops-oriented environment including CI/CD and production monitoring

• Experience with search or recommendation systems (e.g. Open Search, Elasticsearch)
• Experience working alongside ML/data science teams on personalisation or relevance problems
• Experience in experiment-led or hypothesis-driven teams with strong data and insights practices
• Experience in marketplace or eCommerce environments
• Hands‑on experience with message brokers or streaming platforms such as Kafka or similar technologies
• Experien…