Senior Software Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer (AI-Augmented)

Location: London, Hybrid

Salary: Up to £100,000 + Discretionary Bonus

We're working with a well-funded, founder-led startup in the sports-tech space. The co-founders are domain insiders backed by specialists in AI and SaaS, building next-generation intelligent content infrastructure for a fast-moving market. Small team, high trust, and real technical autonomy from day one.

This is a senior backend engineering role for someone with deep engineering foundations who has started to integrate AI tooling into how they work - not as a gimmick, but methodically. You understand where it adds genuine value and where it doesn't.

Responsibilities

Design and build robust, scalable backend services on a modern cloud-native stack

Contribute to architecture decisions and engineering standards across core platform services

Own your work end-to-end - from design through to production and beyond

Work at pace in a small, high-trust engineering team with a low-ego culture

Apply AI tooling thoughtfully as part of your engineering workflow

Key Requirements

Strong hands-on experience with Kafka and event-driven architecture

Java 21 is the primary backend language - polyglot backgrounds across Node.js, Python or Go welcomed

Background in distributed systems, high-availability services and scalable backend design

Senior-level engineering rigour: clean, tested, well-documented code with performance and security in mind

Practical experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code or similar) - you know when to use it and when not to

Desirable

Experience with Flink or Spark streams

AWS, Terraform or cloud-native infrastructure experience

Domain experience in sports tech, live event data or real-time data pipelines

Details

Up to £100,000 + discretionary bonus

Hybrid - London, 2-3 days in office

A strong opportunity for a senior engineer who wants genuine ownership, meaningful technical challenge, and the space to do their best work without layers of process getting in the way.

Due to the high volume of applications, not all applicants will receive feedback.