Senior Python Engineer

6-month contract | £500 per day | London | Hybrid working

A specialist sports modelling and trading technology business is looking for a Senior Python Backend Engineer to join its platform team on an initial six-month contract.

The role will focus on a business‑critical web scraping project designed to expand and improve access to external liquidity providers and real‑time market data. You’ll build reliable, low‑latency services that collect, process and distribute data from external platforms, including systems that may not provide stable or conventional APIs.

This is a strong opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys technically challenging work involving web scraping, reverse engineering, real‑time data, imperfect third‑party integrations and production systems where speed, correctness and reliability all matter.

You’ll work within a small, highly capable engineering team and take ownership of services with a direct commercial impact.

• Building and maintaining high-performance web scraping and data collection services using Python and asyncio
• Reverse engineering websites, network requests and third‑party platforms to identify reliable methods of accessing real‑time data
• Developing low‑latency data feeds that integrate with internal trading systems
• Designing resilient services that can respond to changes in external websites and data sources
• Managing challenges such as session handling, authentication, rate limits, retries, timeouts and changing page structures
• Creating stable internal interfaces that shield the wider trading platform from unreliable external systems
• Working with distributed systems, event‑driven architecture and high‑throughput messaging
• Improving observability using structured logging, latency metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, heartbeats and alerting
• Contributing to architectural decisions and the technical direction of the project
• Supporting engineering quality through code reviews, documentation and knowledge sharing

• Commercial experience building web scraping, data extraction or automated data collection systems
• Experience working with asynchronous Python, ideally using asyncio
• Experience reverse engineering websites or undocumented third‑party integrations
• Knowledge of distributed systems, messaging platforms or event‑driven architecture
• A thoughtful approach to reliability, resilience and operational behaviour
• Strong judgement around architecture, maintainability and pragmatic delivery
• Confidence working with business‑critical production systems
• Excellent problem‑solving skills and attention to detail

The wider technology environment includes:

Python, asyncio, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, LXD Containers, Ansible and Open Telemetry
, alongside modern AI engineering tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex
.

• Initial six-month contract
• London‑based hybrid working

For a Senior Python Backend Engineer who wants to work at the sharp end of real‑time trading technology, this is an opportunity to deliver a technically complex web scraping project where performance, reliability and correctness genuinely matter.

Apply now or get in touch for a confidential conversation.