Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform)

SEAI AI & Machine Learning, Software Development Greater London £125K - £160K / Year

London – On-site - £160,000+ and Equity

I’m working with a high-growth, venture-backed AI platform that’s transforming how leading financial institutions automate, validate, and scale complex client work.

The business has achieved exceptional global traction in under a year, is backed by top-tier investors, and is now strengthening its core engineering team with an experienced Senior Backend Engineer.

The role

This is a high-impact backend engineering role at the heart of the platform. You’ll design and scale the infrastructure that powers an enterprise-grade AI workspace used by major financial organisations.

Working closely with machine learning engineers, product teams, and infrastructure specialists, you’ll build secure, high-performance backend systems capable of handling sensitive financial data, complex pipelines, and AI model deployment at scale.

You’ll also play a key role in technical decision-making, mentoring engineers, and shaping backend engineering standards as the platform scales globally.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building scalable backend services and APIs for a production AI platform
• Developing and optimising data pipelines for large-scale, high-accuracy financial datasets
• Ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and data protection
• Collaborating with ML engineers to productionise AI models
• Optimising databases for high-throughput, low-latency workloads
• Leading technical design reviews and mentoring junior engineers
• Monitoring system performance, debugging production issues, and improving reliability
• Contributing to backend best practices, code quality, and documentation

What they’re looking for

• 7+ years backend engineering experience building and scaling production systems
• Expert-level Python experience (FastAPI ideal; Flask/Django also welcome)
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge, including query optimisation and performance tuning
• Proven experience scaling databases in production
• Deep understanding of Redis and caching strategies
• Hands-on experience with Celery or equivalent asynchronous task queues
• Experience with message brokers and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, etc.)
• Strong grasp of RESTful API design and microservices architecture
• Cloud experience (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP acceptable)
• Docker and Kubernetes experience
• Strong understanding of security, authentication, and encryption best practices
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Git
• Comfortable debugging complex, distributed systems
• Strong communication skills and cross-functional collaboration experience

Why this role stands out

• Direct reporting line to founders with multiple successful exits
• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity
• Ownership of backend systems supporting real enterprise AI use cases
• Opportunity to help build a category-defining AI company

What to expect

This is not a comfortable role. The systems are complex, the pace is high, and priorities will shift.

But for the right engineer, it’s a rare opportunity to solve hard problems at the intersection of AI, data, and finance, while making a defining impact at a critical growth stage.

If you’re a Senior Backend Engineer ready for a serious challenge and real ownership, apply or reach out directly for a confidential conversation.