Find a job 
Featured Companies 
Featured Universities 
For Companies At a Glance
- Tasks: Join a dynamic team to optimise backend systems for a global movie theatre platform.
- Company: INDY powers cinema operations worldwide, handling millions of tickets annually with a nimble engineering team.
- Benefits: Enjoy remote work flexibility and the chance to make a visible impact on millions of moviegoers.
- Why this job: Be part of a tight-knit crew where your work directly influences cinema experiences across six continents.
- Qualifications: 5+ years in backend systems, deep Ruby/Rails expertise, and hands-on MySQL tuning experience required.
- Other info: Contribute to open-source projects and tech blogs while collaborating with founders and domain experts.
The predicted salary is between 48000 - 84000 £ per year.
Location: Remote (Global)
Team Size: ≈ 10 engineers
Core Stack: Ruby on Rails (API-only), Sidekiq, MySQL, AWS (EC2, RDS, EFS), Highcharts.js (data consumers)
About INDY
INDY powers every operational layer of a movie theater—from ticket sales and concessions to scheduling, accounting, and real-time business intelligence. Our platform handles tens of millions of tickets a year across cinemas worldwide, yet we remain a nimble team where each engineer’s work is felt immediately in theaters on six continents.
Why This Role Exists
Our home-grown reporting platform is the analytical backbone of INDY. It decomposes incoming queries into thousands of parallel Sidekiq jobs (hourly → daily → weekly → monthly roll-ups) and serves the results back to cinema managers in seconds. As volume soars, we need a backend-focused engineer to:
- Own and harden this distributed reporting engine.
- Design data pipelines that can ingest years of transactional data and still answer ad-hoc questions quickly.
- You will partner with—but not be accountable for—front-end engineers who wire these APIs into Vue-based dashboards.
What You’ll Do
- Architect & Scale
- Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
- Tune Sidekiq queues, worker pools, and EC2 autoscaling groups for bursty loads.
- Refactor long-running jobs into idempotent, parallelizable units.
- Maintain Data Integrity & Observability
- Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.
- Instrument metrics/alerting around throughput, latency, and cost.
- Expand Administrative Workflows
- Expose clean GraphQL/REST contracts that power accounting tools for film bookings, revenue splits, and studio payouts.
- Introduce domain-specific abstractions (DSLs, helpers) so other engineers can add new report types rapidly.
- Collaborate Across Functions
- Work with infra engineers on Terraform-managed AWS resources.
- Pair with front-end devs to ensure APIs are ergonomic and secure.
- Advise product and finance teams on data-model trade-offs.
What We’re Looking For
Must-Have
- 5+ yrs building high-throughput backend systems
- Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise
- Hands-on MySQL tuning (indexes, partitioning, query plans)
- Proven record scaling background-job frameworks (Sidekiq, Resque, Celery, etc.)
- AWS production experience (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC)
Nice-to-Have
- Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores
- Exposure to ClickHouse/Redshift/BigQuery
- Event-driven or stream processing (Kafka, Kinesis)
- Familiarity with data-viz pipelines (we use Highcharts.js)
- Contributions to OSS or tech-blog posts on performance
What Success Looks Like (6-12 Months)
- Daily report-generation latency cut by 50 % while data volume doubles.
- Zero-downtime schema migrations and automated backfill strategy in place.
- First phase of studio-settlement APIs shipped and adopted by finance ops.
- Comprehensive dashboards/alerts proactively surface scaling limits before customers notice.
Why INDY Rocks
- Massive Visible Impact – Your optimizations ripple out to millions of moviegoers.
- Start-to-Finish Ownership – No layers of bureaucracy; ship, measure, iterate.
- Technically Spicy – Distributed computing meets real-world financial correctness.
- Tight-Knit Crew – Collaborate directly with founders and domain experts.
Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure employer: INDY
Contact Detail:
INDY Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure
✨Tip Number 1
Familiarise yourself with the core technologies mentioned in the job description, especially Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Consider building a small project or contributing to an open-source project that uses these technologies to demonstrate your hands-on experience.
✨Tip Number 2
Engage with the community around distributed systems and backend engineering. Join relevant forums, attend meetups, or participate in online discussions to network with professionals in the field and gain insights into best practices.
✨Tip Number 3
Prepare to discuss your previous experiences with scaling backend systems and optimising database performance. Be ready to share specific examples of challenges you faced and how you overcame them, as this will showcase your problem-solving skills.
✨Tip Number 4
Research INDY's platform and its impact on the cinema industry. Understanding their business model and how your role as a Senior Backend Engineer can contribute to their success will help you stand out during interviews.
We think you need these skills to ace Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure
Some tips for your application 🫡
Tailor Your CV: Make sure your CV highlights relevant experience in backend systems, particularly with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Emphasise any projects where you've optimised performance or scaled systems, as this aligns closely with what INDY is looking for.
Craft a Compelling Cover Letter: In your cover letter, express your passion for data infrastructure and how your skills can contribute to INDY's mission. Mention specific experiences that demonstrate your ability to handle high-throughput systems and your familiarity with tools like Sidekiq and AWS.
Showcase Relevant Projects: If you have worked on any open-source projects or personal projects that relate to distributed reporting or data pipelines, include them in your application. This will showcase your hands-on experience and commitment to the field.
Highlight Collaboration Skills: Since the role involves working with front-end engineers and other teams, make sure to mention any past experiences where you successfully collaborated across functions. This could be through joint projects or cross-departmental initiatives.
How to prepare for a job interview at INDY
✨Know Your Tech Stack
Familiarise yourself with Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, MySQL, and AWS. Be prepared to discuss your experience with these technologies and how you've used them in past projects, especially in high-throughput environments.
✨Demonstrate Problem-Solving Skills
Be ready to tackle technical challenges during the interview. Think through how you would architect a distributed reporting engine or optimise MySQL schemas. Show your thought process and approach to problem-solving.
✨Showcase Collaboration Experience
Highlight your ability to work across functions, especially with front-end engineers and product teams. Share examples of how you've successfully collaborated on projects and ensured smooth API integrations.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
Expect questions about your past experiences and how you've handled challenges. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to structure your answers and demonstrate your impact in previous roles.
