Senior Backend Engineer

## About the Role Our mission is to help large successful brands like Uber, Amazon, Wise, HelloFresh (and more!) put their customers at the centre of everything they do. Using best-in-class tech in a fast-evolving AI space, our Customer Experience Intelligence platform continuously analyses explicit and implicit feedback to help our clients identify what to do next. We're now looking for a talented Senior Backend Engineer to join the team! ## Responsibilities You'll be designing, building and scaling the backend services and APIs that power Chattermill's core analytics platform. Owning and driving the delivery of high-impact engineering workstreams and integrating AI capabilities into the product experience. This means you will: - Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power Chattermill's core analytics platform. - Architect reliable, maintainable distributed systems and contribute to the evolution of backend service design and infrastructure. - Own end-to-end delivery of backend engineering workstreams, from technical scoping and architecture through to implementation, testing, observability, and production support. - Integrate language models, agentic frameworks, and AI pipelines into core product and backend services. - Drive performance, reliability, and observability across high-throughput distributed data systems, including logging, tracing, alerting, and incident response. - Work with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems in GCP (preferred) or AWS environments. - Collaborate closely with Product to define scope, shape technical solutions, and explore new platform capabilities and features. - Contribute to engineering excellence through code reviews, architectural discussions, and continuous improvement of development standards across the team. ## Requirements - Strong professional experience operating as a senior backend engineer within high-ownership product engineering teams. - Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as Python, Ruby, or Go, with a focus on scalable system design and architectural thinking. - Solid understanding of distributed systems, RESTful APIs, and event-driven architectures. - Experience optimising database performance at scale, including query tuning, indexing, and partitioning across large production datasets. - Cloud platform experience, ideally within GCP environments, although AWS experience is also valued. - Hands-on experience with observability tooling and production operations, including logging, tracing, alerting, and incident response. - Proven ability to independently deliver backend features and technical projects in fast-paced product environments. ## Nice to Have - Experience integrating LLMs, prompt engineering techniques, or agentic frameworks such as Anthropic, OpenAI, or MCP. - Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and tools such as Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code. - Experience working with ClickHouse, BigQuery, or other analytical databases supporting large-scale analytical workloads. - Experience with customer feedback analytics, NLP, or text analytics platforms. - Familiarity with Elasticsearch or large-scale search infrastructure. - Experience building asynchronous or event-driven systems using technologies such as PubSub, Kafka, or equivalent. - Contributions to open-source projects, conference speaking, or public technical writing. ## Hiring Process - Let's introduce ourselves – you'll complete an introductory asynchronous interview - we'd love to learn more about you, your ambitions, and what you're looking for in your next step. - Show us how your work and reason - You'll meet with a member of our engineering team to complete a Live pseudo-code exercise. - Get to know your would-be team – You'll meet people you'll be working closely with from our Engineering team, and complete a System design and architecture-based interview. - Get to know your would-be manager – you'll have a call with Ugo Anomelechi, our VP of Engineering, to learn more about the role and show off your experience. - How our values and your career goals align – you'll have a call with our cofounder to learn more about life at Chattermill and ensure we're the right place for your next stage of growth. ## What We Offer ### Flexibility & Work Setup - Flexible working in a choice-first environment - we trust the way you want to work! - Work-from-home allowance to set up your ideal workspace ### Time Off - 25 days holiday + local bank holidays, plus an extra day for each year of service - Your birthday off ### Growth & Ownership - Annual learning & development budget to support your growth (increasing over time) - Equity options — share in the company's success ### Health & Wellbeing - Monthly health & wellbeing budget, increasing with length of service - Optional private healthcare plan - Life assurance & income protection (location dependent) - Employee Assistance Programme (location dependent) for extra support when you need it - Enhanced family leave (location dependent), plus fertility and neonatal leave ### Office Perks - If you're in London, a dog-friendly office with great classes, events, and a rooftop terrace ## About the Company We are obsessed with experience – We take our mission to rid the world of bad Customer Experience seriously, and we practice what we preach. We believe in the power of trust – Whether it's with each other, our customers, partners, or other stakeholders, we always communicate with openness and trust. We act as responsible owners – Whether it's about the company, a team, a project, or a task, having the freedom to make decisions in our area of responsibility is a crucial driver for us. We share a passion for growth & progress – On every level, we're motivated by taking on new challenges – even if they seem out of reach. We r