Senior Backend Engineer

About Us

Plentific is a property technology platform used by housing providers, local authorities, housing associations, asset managers, and contractors across the UK and Germany to coordinate repairs, maintenance, and contractor workflows at scale. The platform combines a marketplace, workflow automation, and operational analytics, and is built to handle the volume and compliance demands of social housing, local authority property portfolios, and large-scale residential operations. We are headquartered in London and our team works across Europe. We are growing the team to expand the platform's coverage across Europe and to integrate AI throughout the product and operating model. If you are interested in working on hard, real-world problems in a sector that has long been under-served by good software, we would like to hear from you.

The Role

This is a hands-on, fully remote role in one of Plentific's cross-functional product engineering teams. The Senior Backend Engineer works alongside product managers, frontend engineers, quality engineers, and other backend engineers to build and operate the services behind repairs, quoting and invoicing, payments, contractor search, messaging, notifications, and fraud prevention.

The role

is open across the European countries where we currently employ or engage remote engineers. Our backend is built primarily in Python and Django, with Django REST Framework and FastAPI supporting APIs in a service-oriented architecture deployed on AWS and Kubernetes. PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery underpin data-intensive and asynchronous workflows. The systems handle complex permissions, legacy integrations, high transaction volumes, and business processes where reliability and data correctness matter. AI-assisted, spec-driven development is part of normal engineering practice at Plentific. The Senior Backend Engineer turns product requirements into implementation-ready specifications, uses agentic coding tools across implementation, testing, review, and documentation, and remains accountable for the resulting software. AI-generated output is held to the same standard as human-written code. Success means delivering reliable services, improving the codebase and engineering practice around the role, and enabling the wider team to ship confidently at pace. Key Responsibilities Backend Engineering Build and maintain APIs, microservices, and data pipelines using Python, Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, and related platform tooling. Design service boundaries, API contracts, relational data models, and integration flows for complex property operations. Produce ERDs and other technical diagrams where they make relationships, ownership, and system behaviour easier to review. Develop asynchronous and event-driven workflows using technologies such as Celery and Redis. Write complex SQL, evolve PostgreSQL schemas safely, and optimise database performance where customer experience or operational throughput depends on it. Review, refactor, and retire existing code so it remains readable, testable, maintainable, and suitable for new product requirements. Quality, Reliability, and Operations Write automated tests at the appropriate level and integrate them into CI/CD so changes can be released with clear evidence of quality. Instrument services with logs, metrics, traces, and alerts that make production behaviour and failures easy to understand. Diagnose and resolve production incidents across services, databases, queues, integrations, and infrastructure. Design for security, resilience, performance, and data integrity across business-critical workflows. Agentic and Spec-Driven Development Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, and quality engineers to turn agreed product behaviour into implementation-ready technical solution designs covering assumptions, alternatives, service interactions, data and schema changes, failure modes, security, observability, rollout, rollback, and tests. Use agentic coding tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent to generate, refactor, test, review, and document code within clear technical constraints. Evaluate AI-generated code critically for correctness, maintainability, security, performance, and fit with Plentific's architecture. Break specifications into small, reviewable changes and validate each change against its intended behaviour before release. Improve the team's spec-driven development practice through reusable patterns, review checklists, examples, and concise documentation. Delivery and Collaboration Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, quality engineers, and other backend engineers from problem framing through release and production operation. Surface technical risks and trade-offs early, and propose pragmatic changes to scope, design, or delivery plans. Review code and technical designs, setting a high bar while giving feedback that helps other engineers improve. Coach mid-level and junior engineers through pairing, code review, debugging, and design discussion.

Requirements

Expert-level Python and Django, with strong object-oriented design and software engineering fundamentals. Strong command of API design, service-oriented architecture, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing. Expert-level relational data modelling, including the ability to produce clear ERDs, define entities, relationships, constraints, and ownership, and design PostgreSQL schemas that balance correctness, performance, and safe evolution. Demonstrable ability to turn incomplete product requirements into clear technical solution designs for complex backend changes, identifying assumptions and resolving ambiguity with product and engineering colleagues through concise written analysis and appropriate architecture, sequence, data-flow, and entity-relationship diagrams. Sound judgement around automated testing, observability, production reliability, security, and data integrity. Strong working fluency with agenti