Job Title: Backend Engineer

Location: UK (Remote)

Contract: 6 months (with possible extension)

Rate: £400 - £500 per day (Umbrella)

About Us:

Our mission is to foster a sense of community and belonging by bringing people together around their passions and interests. With over 50 million daily visitors across 100,000+ communities, we are home to some of the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. From pets to parenting, skincare to stocks, there’s a community for everyone here.

The Role:

We are looking for a talented Backend Engineer to join our ML Ranking Platform and ML Understanding (MLU) teams. You will work on services that support personalized ranking, semantic content extraction, and ML model deployment. Your role will involve building and maintaining robust backend services, ensuring operational efficiency, and contributing to system design and architecture. You will collaborate closely with machine learning engineers to develop innovative models and services that enhance user experiences.

Key Responsibilities:
• System Design & Architecture: Design and optimize backend systems with a focus on scalability, latency, and resilience, while ensuring they are aligned with the needs of machine learning platforms.
• Backend Development: Develop backend services primarily using Go and Python following SOLID principles and best practices like design patterns and test-driven development (TDD).
• Service Maintenance & Feature Development: Maintain existing services and build new features, ensuring system reliability and operational excellence.
• Kubernetes & Cloud Infrastructure: Utilize Kubernetes to manage containerized applications and work with cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud.
• Data Streaming & Message Queues: Work with Kafka for managing event streams and Redis for in-memory data storage to optimize performance.
• Database Management: Handle data storage and transactions using PostgreSQL.
• Automation & Monitoring: Implement automation for deployment pipelines, monitoring, and alerting to ensure system health and quick incident response.

Required Technical Skills:
• Proficiency in:
• Go and Python
• AWS and/or Google Cloud
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• PostgreSQL
• Strong knowledge of object-oriented programming, design patterns, and writing testable, maintainable code.
• Experience in testing methodologies, particularly TDD.

Nice-to-Have Skills:
• Familiarity with Google BigQuery, Terraform, and ML systems.