Full job descriptionLead Back End Developer - Contract role - London

Overview
A growing, data-driven organisation is looking for a Lead Back End Developer to shape and deliver the services that sit at the heart of its platform.

You’ll lead a team of engineers, own technical direction and stay hands-on in the code. The stack is flexible (Python, C# and others), so strong engineering fundamentals matter more than any one language.

Responsibilities
*Lead the design and build of scalable, secure back end services and APIs
*Own the architecture of event-driven pipelines built on Kafka
*Set engineering standards across code quality, testing, CI/CD and documentation
*Mentor developers, run code reviews and guide technical decisions
*Work with product and data teams to turn requirements into reliable services
*Make sure systems meet security and data protection expectations
*Monitor, troubleshoot and improve performance and reliability in production

Skills and Experience
*Strong commercial back end experience in Python, C#/.NET or a comparable language
*Proven experience designing, building and versioning APIs (REST, and ideally gRPC or GraphQL)
*Hands-on Kafka experience, including topic design, producers and consumers, and stream processing
*Experience leading or mentoring engineers, or acting as a technical lead
*Solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases
*Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)

Details
*£650 - £750 P/D (Inside IR35)
*Hybrid role - 2 days P/W onsite
*Initial 6 Month contract