Senior Backend Engineer

About the Company

Depop is a peer‑to‑peer circular fashion marketplace founded in 2011, headquartered in London with offices in New York and Manchester.

Senior Backend Software Engineer – Full‑time, permanent. The role is based in the Payments team and collaborates with mobile, web, and machine‑learning/data‑science teams.

• Work closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Product Designers, and other engineers to understand problems and design solutions.
• Produce high‑quality, well‑structured code that is simple to understand and used by over 1million active daily users.
• Take ownership of product development from feature discovery through implementation.
• Provide end‑to‑end application support, including production incident management.
• Embrace agile methodologies and user‑centred thinking.
• Participate in blameless post‑mortems, architecture reviews, and engineering guild sessions.
• Collaborate daily with cross‑functional engineers to solve problems and write code.
• Mentor and coach colleagues.
• Own the entire lifecycle of code, workflows, and data.

• Strong background in writing high‑quality code in Type Script, Scala, Java, Kotlin, or another JVM‑compatible language.
• Experience with relational databases, ideally Postgres, and No
  
  SQL data stores such as DynamoDB.
• Knowledge of stream processing (e.g., Kafka).
• Building scalable web applications capable of handling tens of thousands of requests per second.
• Dev Ops culture and experience with Kubernetes or equivalent containers.
• Proactive problem‑solving and the ability to seek guidance when needed.
• Product‑oriented mindset focusing on solving real business problems without over‑engineering.
• Experience with iterative development and A/B testing.

• Solid software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated ability to learn and effectively use our Scala stack.
• Willingness to work across multiple paradigms and languages, including backend or data work, using Scala and Python.
• Strong technical and non‑technical communication skills.
• Proficient in testing at unit and integration levels.
• Experience with relational or non‑relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration.

• Experience with payment SDKs (Stripe, Pay Pal, or similar).
• Work in marketplace or fintech environments.
• Experience with Play framework.
• Knowledge of eCommerce platforms.
• Event‑driven architectures, preferably using Kafka.
• Experience with production AWS infrastructure and Terraform.
• Python experience.
• Data engineering experience.

• Health and mental wellbeing package, including PMI, cash plan, Bupa healthcare access, subsidised counselling and coaching, and an Employee Assistance Programme.
• Annual leave: 25 days with up to 5 days carry‑over.
• Impact hours: up to 2 days of paid volunteer leave per year.
• Fully paid 4‑week sabbatical after 5 years of continuous service.
• Flexible working model with hybrid‑working options (MyMode).
• Dog‑friendly offices.
• Parental leave: up to 20 weeks for birth parents, 12 weeks for non‑birth parents; additional IVF, shared, and emergency leave options.
• Learning budget and development opportunities.
• Life insurance (3× salary) and pension matching up to 6% of base salary.
• In‑office Depop shop with free packing station.

Depop is an equal‑opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We continually refine our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and accommodate any needs.