Backend Engineer / DevOps

We are seeking a hands-on mid/senior Backend Engineer with serious DevOps chops to help drive our platform forward. You'll sit at the intersection of application code and infrastructure — writing services, shaping pipelines, and owning how things run in production on Azure.

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, visible impact.

We are language-agnostic in our hiring. Our current stack leans on 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.

You should be an excellent communicator who can translate complex requirements into

functional architecture, with the confidence to challenge the status quo and a strong vision for where our stack should go next.

Key Responsibilities

• Backend Development: Maintain and enhance existing services while building new features for our next-generation platforms. Ensure clean integration across systems and peer-review your teammates' code to keep the bar high.

• DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure: Own and evolve our Azure infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. Build infrastructure-as-code, manage containerised workloads, and make sure deployments are fast, safe, and boring (in a good way).

• DevSecOps: Embed security practices throughout the development lifecycle. Harden pipelines, manage secrets properly, and treat security as a first-class concern rather than an afterthought.

• Technology Evaluation: Assess current backend applications and infrastructure to identify improvement opportunities. Set high standards for quality, performance, and operational excellence.

• Testing & Quality: Design and implement comprehensive testing — unit, contract, integration, end-to-end — to ensure reliability of backend applications.

• Performance Optimisation: Improve application performance through strategic database and architecture work, prioritising scalability and speed.

• Collaboration: Work closely with product, frontend, and QA to align technology with business goals.

Requirements

Required Skills

• Backend Development: 4+ years of commercial backend development 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.

• Azure: Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure — services such as App Service, Azure Functions, Azure DevOps, AKS, Azure SQL, and Azure Storage.

• CI/CD: Proven experience building and maintaining automated pipelines for build, test, deployment, and security scanning. Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions experience preferred.

• Containers & IaC: Hands-on with Docker and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep, Terraform, or similar). Kubernetes (AKS) experience is a strong plus.

• API Design: Designing and managing scalable, secure APIs.

• Automated Testing: Extensive experience with automated testing practices across multiple layers.

• Database Management: Strong understanding of MySQL/relational databases and at least one NoSQL store.

• Communication: Strong English (B2+), comfortable communicating with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable Skills

• Kubernetes at depth — Helm, ingress, observability, autoscaling.

• Secure coding practices and familiarity with modern security protocols (OAuth2/OIDC, secret management, SAST/DAST tooling).

• Building services from scratch — taking something from idea to production.

• Observability stack experience — Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, or similar.

• AI-assisted development tooling in your day-to-day workflow (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot).

• Frontend awareness — React or similar — useful but not essential.