All About Us
At Purplebricks, we’re not your average estate agency. We’re flipping the script on the property game using smart tech, fresh ideas, and a serious focus on people to make buying and selling homes smoother, faster, and actually enjoyable.
We’re all about keeping things real. Real support. Real flexibility. Real opportunities. We know success doesn’t come from standing still and neither do we. If you're hungry to grow, driven to succeed, and ready to be rewarded for it, this could be the start of something big. We’re big fans of promoting from within, so your first role here might just be the first step in a much bigger journey.
What Is A Lead Backend Engineer?
You'll be leading one of our three product squads — a multi-skilled team usually consisting of Back End,
Front-End, QA, UX Designers, Content Creators, and a Product Manager, supported by other leads and
Staff Engineers.
When it comes to culture - we really try to build cohesive, high performing teams that pull together.
Each squad feels a real sense of ownership over their work. Building an environment based on trust and
honesty is really important to us, enabling squads and individuals to grow and develop.
As a lead backend engineer, your time will be split between coaching other backend developers within
the team, steering our backend architecture and providing oversight on the back end tasks for our
backlog items - delivering some independently and some through coaching others. As we work in
multidisciplinary squads, ideally you will also be able to support others doing Front End, QA, DevOps
(etc) work to make sure we hit our sprint goals.
Your new development will be done within a Microservices architecture, but you will also be
contributing to our legacy systems while we are in the transition period. Our stack runs on Azure —
including Front Door, App Services, Application Insights, and App Configuration — with SQL Server and
Cosmos DB for data and Azure Service Bus for messaging between services.
Outside of squad work you will be part of the Back End Chapter. We hold Chapter meetings to talk about
tech and ways of working. We work democratically to evolve our stack and make constant
improvements.
What Skills Are You Bringing To The Team?
Required Skills/Experience
- Strong C# development experience
- Experience with both .NET Core and .NET Web API
- Experience of building Microservices in .NET Core
- Experience using Message Based Architectures
- Experience using both SQL & NoSQL technologies
- Experience of API design
- Cloud development/architecture (Azure)
- Experience working in an Agile environment (Scrum/Kanban)
- Knowledge and experience of Unit Testing (xUnit, nUnit)
- Familiarity with modern UI frameworks and tooling (React, React Native, npm)
- Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into back-end services (e.g. OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, or similar APIs)
Desired Skills/Experience
- Experience of TDD practices
- DevOps (CI/CD, Pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code)
- Experience managing a team of developers
- Exposure to Agentic AI patterns (tool use, orchestration frameworks, MCP, or similar)
- Experience working with Azure DevOps build and release pipelines
Core Values
- An excellent communicator and relationship builder
- Confident in providing technical guidance and mentoring to mid-level and junior developers
- Enjoys bringing clarity to situations then helping others to take ownership
- Role-models curiosity, open-mindedness, honesty, and transparency
- Advocacy for great engineering practices around the Digital & Technology team
- Actively keeps up to date with modern tools, frameworks, and industry trends — and brings new thinking back to the team
What Will You Be Accountable For?
You will be part of a Product focused Technical squad, where the squad is responsible for building,
delivering and maintaining fantastic software. This means you will be involved in all stages of your
lifecycle from the initial discovery, through planning, build, release and monitoring. You'll be part of all
the usual Agile ceremonies and as a team, you will be delivering great new functionality over two-week
sprints.
Leading the design, delivery and ongoing health of the backend services owned by your squad — from technical direction and architectural decisions through to hands-on coding, code review, and production support. You'll be accountable for the quality, performance, and security of what your squad ships, for coaching and growing the backend engineers around you, and for contributing to the wider backend architecture and standards through the Back End Chapter.
What Success Looks Like
- Your squad ships valuable, well-tested backend changes predictably every sprint
- Backend services are reliable, performant, and observable in production
- Engineers on your team are visibly growing — taking on harder problems with less guidance over time
- Technical decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and aligned with the wider architecture
- You're a trusted voice in the Back End Chapter, shaping standards and ways of working
- Cross-discipline collaboration is smooth — QA, Front-End, and Product feel well-supported by backend
How Will We Measure Success
- Sprint delivery predictability and throughput across the squad
- Production reliability — uptime, incident frequency, and mean time to recovery for owned services
- Code quality signals — defect escape rate, test coverage on changed code, and review turnaround
- Deployment frequency and lead time for backend changes
- Progression of the engineers you coach, evidenced through performance reviews and scope of work taken on
- Contribution to the Back End Chapter — standards, tooling, and shared improvements adopted by other squads
