Backend Engineer, Generalist

About The Role

We are seeking a highly motivated and passionate mid/senior Backend Engineer to help drive the next chapter of our technology platform. The ideal candidate has a minimum of 4 years of commercial backend development experience and the engineering judgement to challenge, evolve, and improve what we have today.

This role is crucial for driving our technology strategy forward, focusing on bolstering a robust cloud-based property and content management platform with 11 integrations already in place, and more planned. You'll also help build out our Booking & Request Management Platform, which incorporates real-time data, analytics, and predictive intelligence features. This is a growing business where you can have immediate impact.

We are language-agnostic in our hiring. Our current stack is PHP (Symfony) and Node.js, but we welcome strong engineers from any modern backend background — Python, Go, Java, C#, Ruby, or otherwise — who can ramp up quickly and bring fresh thinking. We run on Azure.

You should be an excellent communicator who can translate complex requirements into functional architecture, with hands-on experience in software development and the confidence to push the platform forward.

We're looking for a team member who will be committed to the cause, flexible, reliable and responsible — keeping the team informed, being an active listener, and always at hand to support and respect others.

Key Responsibilities

• Technology Evaluation and Enhancement: Conduct thorough assessments of our current backend applications and infrastructure to identify improvement opportunities. Challenge and evolve our platform technologies to enhance performance and scalability.

• Code Development and Integration: Maintain and enhance existing codebases while developing new features for our next-generation platforms. Ensure seamless integration across systems. Peer-review backend code to help build the highest-quality solution.

• Standards: Lead, contribute to, and develop coding and technological standards.

• Testing and Quality Assurance: Design and implement comprehensive testing frameworks — unit, contract, and end-to-end — to ensure functionality, reliability, and quality of backend applications.

• Collaboration and Leadership: Work closely with product, frontend, DevOps, and QA engineers to align technologies with business objectives, improve user experiences, and bolster delivery.

• DevSecOps Practices: Follow Agile methodologies and contribute to CI/CD pipelines on Azure, embedding security practices throughout the development lifecycle.

• Performance Optimisation: Optimise application performance through strategic database and architecture enhancements, prioritising user experience, scalability, and speed.

Requirements

Required Skills

• Backend Development: 4+ years of commercial backend experience in any modern

• backend language (PHP, Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C#, Ruby, etc.). Experience with PHP (Symfony) or Node.js is a plus given our current stack.

• API Design: Demonstrable experience designing and managing scalable, secure APIs.

• Automated Testing: Extensive experience with automated testing practices.

• Database Management: Strong understanding of MySQL and NoSQL databases.

• CI/CD: Comfortable working with automated pipelines for build, deployment, security checks, and quality assurance.

• Cloud: Some exposure to Microsoft Azure (or willingness to ramp up quickly — most of our team came from AWS/GCP).

• Communication: Strong English (B2+), able to engage technical and non-technical team Members.

Desirable Skills

• DevOps & Security: Experience with Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), Docker, and secure coding practices.

• AI-Assisted Development: Familiarity with AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and a curiosity about integrating them into your workflow to accelerate delivery and improve code quality.

• Creating APIs from Scratch: Taking requirements or existing applications and building new services from idea to production.

• Polyglot Background: Working across multiple backend languages.

• Frontend Awareness: React or similar modern frontend frameworks