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- 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 real impact in the entertainment industry.
- Why this job: Be part of a tight-knit crew where your work directly influences millions of moviegoers globally.
- Qualifications: 5+ years in backend systems, deep Ruby/Rails expertise, and hands-on MySQL tuning experience required.
- Other info: Contribute to OSS or tech blogs and collaborate closely with founders and experts.
The predicted salary is between 48000 - 72000 £ 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. Having hands-on experience or projects that showcase your skills in these areas will help you stand out during discussions.
✨Tip Number 2
Prepare to discuss your experience with distributed systems and how you've optimised backend processes in previous roles. Be ready to share specific examples of how you've improved performance or scalability in high-throughput environments.
✨Tip Number 3
Showcase your understanding of data integrity and observability practices. Be prepared to talk about how you've implemented validation, audit trails, or metrics in past projects, as this aligns closely with what INDY is looking for.
✨Tip Number 4
Highlight any collaborative experiences you've had with cross-functional teams, particularly with front-end developers or product teams. This role requires strong communication skills, so demonstrating your ability to work well with others will be beneficial.
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 your experience with backend systems, particularly in Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Emphasise any relevant projects or roles that showcase your ability to handle high-throughput systems and data integrity.
Craft a Compelling Cover Letter: In your cover letter, explain why you're passionate about the role at INDY. Mention specific aspects of their reporting platform and how your skills align with their needs, such as your experience with Sidekiq or AWS.
Showcase Relevant Projects: If you have worked on similar projects, include links to your GitHub or portfolio. Highlight any contributions to open-source projects or tech blogs that demonstrate your expertise in backend engineering and performance optimisation.
Prepare for Technical Questions: Anticipate technical questions related to backend architecture, data pipelines, and performance tuning. Be ready to discuss your past experiences and how they relate to the challenges INDY faces, especially around scaling and data integrity.
How to prepare for a job interview at INDY
✨Know Your Tech Stack
Familiarise yourself with Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and AWS services like EC2 and RDS. Be prepared to discuss your experience with these technologies and how you've used them in past projects.
✨Demonstrate Problem-Solving Skills
Expect technical questions that assess your ability to architect scalable systems. Prepare to explain how you would optimise multi-terabyte MySQL schemas or tune Sidekiq queues for performance.
✨Showcase Collaboration Experience
Highlight your experience working with cross-functional teams, especially with front-end developers and infra engineers. Discuss how you’ve collaborated on API design or data integrity initiatives.
✨Prepare for Scenario-Based Questions
Be ready to tackle hypothetical scenarios related to data pipelines and reporting engines. Think about how you would handle increasing data volumes or implement validation and audit trails.
