Lead Engineer II - Backend; Python

Best Egg is a market‑leading, tech‑enabled financial platform helping people build financial confidence through a variety of installment lending solutions and financial health tools. We aim to help customers make smart financial decisions and stay on track, so they can be money confident no matter what life throws at them.

We offer top‑tier benefits and growth opportunities in a culture built on our core values:

Put People First – We foster an inclusive, flexible, and fun workplace.

Create Clarity – Open communication drives trust and results.

Get Things Done – We focus, prioritize, and deliver with excellence.

Deliver with Heart – We lead with kindness, humility, and strong teamwork.

Listen to Our Customers – Their needs drive our innovation.

Barclays has entered into an agreement to acquire Best Egg with closing expected to take place in Q2 2026. This acquisition will give us the resources and capital to continue on our mission and drive our strategy forward. With an aligned culture, lower cost of funds, and increased employee growth opportunities across a global brand, we are excited about the future of the Best Egg brand under the Barclays umbrella.

We are looking for collaborative, innovative team players who like to solve problems. There will also be immense opportunities for those willing to dive in. If you’re inspired by growth and want to make a real difference, Best Egg is the place for you.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse, 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 and 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…