Senior Backend Engineer Location: Remote within the UK, with occasional in-person meetups in London
Type: Full-time
Salary: £70,000-80,000, depending on experience
About the Role
We are looking for a senior backend engineer to help turn our AI assessment capabilities into reliable, scalable product infrastructure. You will build the systems behind customer- facing assessment workflows and help customers integrate sAInaptic into their existing learning and assessment platforms.
This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with substantial ownership of backend delivery. You will work alongside our senior full-stack architect, AI engineers and product team, taking responsibility for turning technical decisions into robust production systems and helping spread implementation and operational knowledge as the company grows. In a small team, your work will have a direct and visible impact on how customers integrate with our platform and how reliably our AI assessment capabilities operate at scale.
About Us
sAInaptic is building an AI-powered multimodal assessment platform.
We’re transforming how assessments are designed, delivered, marked and quality assured through an AI-enabled platform and API for awarding organisations, training providers, employers and educational institutions.
Our AI has already marked millions of free-text responses, saved thousands of marking hours, and delivered savings of more than £150,000 per organisation for individual customers.
sAInaptic was founded by a team of educators and data scientists. We’ve grown from five to nine people in the last 12 months and, following our seed round, are investing in the scalable platform that will support our next phase of growth.
What You’ll Do • Build and maintain Python backend services and customer-facing APIs, primarily
using FastAPI. • Build and extend integrations with learning management systems and other third-
party platforms, including integrations using LTI 1.3. • Design and maintain database-backed workflows using PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy
and Alembic. • Build reliable asynchronous processing for AI assessment work, including
persistence, queues, retries, batching and status tracking. • Support secure customer onboarding through authentication, authorisation,
customer-specific configuration and integration documentation. • Improve deployment, observability and operational reliability across AWS and
CI/CD. • Work with AI engineers on data ingestion, feedback capture, tracing, evaluation
support and cost and latency tracking. • Contribute to technical decisions, code review, testing and documentation,
ensuring important knowledge is shared across the team.
Core Requirements • 5+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience, with strong production
Python experience. • Strong experience building APIs, preferably with FastAPI or similar Python
frameworks. • Solid database experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases,
including schema design, migrations, indexing, and query performance. • Experience with SQLAlchemy, Alembic, or comparable Python database tooling. • Experience designing systems for asynchronous or long-running work: queues,
workers, retries, batching, status tracking, or similar. • Good understanding of API security, authentication, and authorisation patterns
such as OAuth 2.0, JWTs, scopes, and service-to-service access. • Practical cloud experience, preferably AWS. • Comfortable working in a small team where requirements can be ambiguous,
collaborating on architecture while taking substantial responsibility for implementation and delivery.
• Strong attention to detail in naming, interfaces, documentation, tests, and operational behaviour.
If this role sounds like a strong fit, we would still encourage you to apply even if your experience does not line up perfectly with every point above.
Additional Experience • Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools, deployment
automation or zero-downtime deployment patterns. • Experience operating LLM- or ML-backed services in production, including
observability, tracing or experiment tracking. • Experience building multi-tenant, customer-scoped or externally integrated SaaS
platforms. • Experience with LTI 1.3, learning management system integrations or similar
interoperability standards. • Experience with data protection, GDPR or other regulated-data requirements. • Experience in EdTech, assessment technology or workflow-heavy B2B products. • Experience mentoring engineers or raising backend engineering standards within a
small team.
What Success Looks Like
Within the first few months, success would look like:
• backend and platform ownership, operational knowledge and implementation expertise being shared more broadly across the team;
• customer assessment workflows becoming more persistent, retryable and observable, with integrations that are easier to onboard, test and operate;
• AI assessment work having reliable backend support for data ingestion, feedback capture, tracing, evaluation and cost tracking.
Interview Process 1. 45-minute screening call with the Head of Engineering & AI, covering your
background, the role, and a short practical technical discussion. 2. 90-minute technical interview with the Head of Engineering & AI and the senior full-
stack architect. This will include Python/backend code review, API and database design discussion, and applied system-design questions around queues, reliability, security, observability, and operational trade-offs.
3. 45-minute call with the company founders, focused on the company, mission, team fit, and questions from both sides.
Benefits • Remote-first within the UK • Share options • Pension contributions matched by employer up to 5% of salary • Company laptop (MacBook Pro) • 25 days annual leave • Flexible working hours
• Learning budget for courses, books and tools • Conference attendance and speaking opportunities
Right to Work and Equal Opportunities
We are unable to sponsor visas for this role, so candidates must already have the right to work in the UK. sAInaptic is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion and welcomes applications from all suitably qualified candidates.
- Senior Backend Engineer
- About the Role
- About Us
- What You’ll Do
- Core Requirements
- Additional Experience
- What Success Looks Like
- Interview Process
- Benefits
- Right to Work and Equal Opportunities