Job title: Backend Infrastructure Engineer (Python) - London
Job type: Permanent
Emp type: Full-time
Salary type: Annual
Salary: GBP £120,000.00
Location: United Kingdom
Job published: 10/11/2026
Job ID: 58157
Contact name: Nathan Laidlaw
Phone number: +447735484115
Contact email: nathan@transparent.tech

Job Description

Backend Engineer | AI Infrastructure | £90k–£135k | London | Four days p/w onsite 

An ambitious early-stage AI software company is looking for a Backend Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure and services underpinning its next stage of growth. This is an opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys designing reliable systems, solving challenging architectural problems and building the technical foundations that allow innovative products to scale.

Working closely with senior engineering leadership, you'll help define backend architecture, develop production APIs, improve service communication and take responsibility for critical infrastructure. You'll work on distributed workflows, databases, deployments and operational reliability, making architectural decisions that directly influence the performance and scalability of the company's software.

This is a hands-on role requiring much more than API development. You'll be expected to understand how systems behave in production, anticipate failure modes, lead infrastructure improvements and establish sensible engineering standards. You'll have significant autonomy, with opportunities to influence technical direction and support other engineers as the business grows.

What they're looking for:

  • At least four years' experience developing and operating production backend systems.

  • Strong Python and TypeScript engineering experience.

  • Experience designing APIs, services and reliable system architectures.

  • Excellent PostgreSQL or comparable relational database expertise.

  • Experience building asynchronous job processing, workflow orchestration or distributed systems.

  • Strong understanding of concurrency, retries, idempotency and failure recovery.

  • Practical experience with Docker, CI/CD, networking, monitoring and production incident management.

  • Evidence of building or scaling infrastructure and contributing to significant migrations.

  • Proven ownership of substantial engineering projects, including technical decision-making.

  • Experience providing technical leadership, reviewing designs or mentoring other engineers.

  • A relevant technical degree or equivalent experience.

Experience with event-driven architectures, Cloudflare or infrastructure supporting AI applications would be beneficial.

You'll join a technically ambitious team with the freedom to shape systems from the ground up. This position will suit an engineer who wants genuine responsibility for architecture, delivery and production reliability rather than simply implementing individual features.

For a confidential discussion, contact Nathan Laidlaw at Transparent Technology.

Backend Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, FastAPI, Docker, CI CD, Distributed Systems, Workflow Orchestration, Event Driven Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, London.