Senior Backend Engineer

About our client

Our client is the leading insights company, using market-leading data to drive better marketing decisions for global companies. They are growing their engineering team and investing heavily in their SaaS platform.

About the role

They are seeking a highly skilled Senior Backend Engineer to design and build secure, scalable APIs and data services powering a modern B2B SaaS platform. Youll work primarily with Python and SQL on Azure, build reliable integrations (e.g. HubSpot, Outlook/SMTP, OpenAI), and partner closely with product and cross-functional teams to bring the roadmap to life.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend development of a next-generation B2B SaaS product, building Django/FastAPI-based REST APIs consumed by a React SPA behind an application gateway and WAF.

• Implement secure authentication and authorization (Azure AD SSO, optional Okta), role-based access control, and multi-tenant patterns.

• Build and operate resilient asynchronous pipelines (Celery/Redis) for file processing and job orchestration, including exposing job status and progress to the UI.

• Integrate external systems such as HubSpot (REST/webhooks), Outlook/SMTP for notifications, and OpenAI endpoints to support workflow automation.

• Design and maintain schemas in Azure SQL; manage artifacts and results in Azure Blob Storage with appropriate retention and lineage controls.

• Ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of internal and external-facing services; profile and optimise Python code and SQL queries.

• Implement observability (structured logging, metrics, tracing via App Insights/Azure Monitor/OpenTelemetry) and contribute to runbooks, SLAs and SLOs.

• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code; participate in code reviews and help raise engineering standards.

• Stay current with backend, security, and Azure best practices; contribute to threat modelling and periodic hardening efforts.

Qualifications / Requirements

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• 5+ years of experience building production backend systems with Python (Django/DRF or FastAPI) and SQL.

• Proven experience designing and operating RESTful APIs and asynchronous workers (Celery/Redis), including idempotency, retries, and monitoring.

• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure services such as App Service, Application Gateway + WAF, Azure AD/OIDC, Key Vault, Azure SQL, Blob Storage, and Monitor/App Insights.

• Demonstrated experience integrating third-party platforms (e.g. HubSpot APIs/webhooks, SMTP/Outlook, OpenAI APIs).

• Strong data modelling and query optimisation skills; comfortable with schema migrations and performance diagnostics.

• Proficient with testing and CI/CD (pytest, Git/GitHub, GitHub Actions), as well as code reviews and documentation.

• Solid understanding of security best practices (OWASP, secrets management, RBAC, encryption at rest/in transit) and awareness of GDPR considerations.

• Excellent problem-solving skills; proactive, resourceful, and comfortable taking ownership in a fast-moving environment.

• Startup or scale-up experience is a strong plus.