Founding Backend Engineer

London, UK

Salary: £150,000 - £160,000

Equity: 1–1.5%

In-person, with flexible remote days

European visa sponsorship available

About Aurora

Aurora is a digital-first lifestyle management platform built for the world’s highest-performing individuals and organizations. Our members include tier-1 founders, executives, athletes, and families who delegate complex, ongoing needs across travel, dining, experiences, luxury purchases, and health.

The product is mobile-first, conversational, proactive, and available 24/7 globally. Members use Aurora multiple times per day, often for time-sensitive, high-stakes decisions. As a result, the backend is mission-critical: orchestration, data quality, reliability, and speed directly determine the quality of the member experience.

We benefit from high-frequency, conversational feedback, which we use to continuously refine and optimize the system.

Agentify premium lifestyle commerce represents a $10bn+ opportunity. Legacy concierges, travel managers and lifestyle management services rely on outdated CRMs and fragmented, siloed communication channels, failing to meet the expectations and needs of a new generation of high-profile consumers. Aurora is a digital-first, multi-modal, multi-party platform that intelligently combines automation with expert human curators, each deployed at points of maximum leverage.

The result of our work is exceptional early traction: 51% DAU, 95% WAU, and transaction volume and member spend that have already outperformed industry benchmarks by 5× within our first three months.

Aurora is backed and chaired by Alex Macdonald, the most successful founder in this category. His insight and network provide a meaningful advantage as we scale.

So far, we’ve raised $5M from experienced operators and tier-1 investors, built a product with industry leading engagement from paying customers, and collected a large, proprietary set of user context (calendars, preferences, health signals) that powers proactive features.

We’re now expanding the engineering team as we scale the product and the member base. We have an in-person culture, building Aurora from our offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Our engineering team builds in person out of our London office in Belgravia. We also offer flexible remote days.

The role

We’re hiring a highly ambitious Founding Backend Engineer to work closely alongside our CTO and core engineering team to build and evolve Aurora’s backend systems. You’ll work with the founders, product, and other engineers to design and implement the core infrastructure behind the product. This includes APIs, background processing, agent orchestration, and data pipelines that support proactive, AI-driven behaviour.

This is a hands-on role with a high level of ownership. You’ll be responsible for taking features from idea to production and for keeping the system reliable as usage grows. You’ll report directly to the CTO. Over time, your role can grow into a broader technical or leadership position as the company scales.

We ship high-polish, high-leverage products to our discerning customer base. We are urgent with our inputs and pragmatic with our outputs. Many of our early team have ambitions to be founders in the future - we view Aurora as a high-performance startup academy, where you will personally drive the evolution of a high-growth product from its earliest stages.

Join us.

What you’ll do

• Design and build backend services and APIs using Python and Django
• Own features end to end, from initial design to production rollout
• Maintain and evolve background processing, agent orchestration, and LLM integrations
• Work with context-heavy data pipelines and RAG-style systems
• Operate and improve cloud infrastructure on GCP
• Improve performance across SQL queries, background jobs, and API endpoints
• Debug production issues and lead incident resolution
• Implement secure coding practices and support compliance efforts
• Collaborate closely with product, curators, and frontend/mobile engineers
• Review code and help raise the overall technical bar

What we’re looking for

Experience

• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems
• Strong, hands-on experience with Python and Django
• Backend fundamentals
• Deep familiarity with Django and DRF, including common pitfalls
• Strong SQL skills and experience with schema design and performance tuning
• Experience with background job systems (ideally Celery)

Infrastructure

• Experience running cloud-native systems, ideally on GCP
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, preferable Terraform
• Experience operating services in production, not just building them

Product mindset

• You care about how systems are used, not just how they’re built
• You think in terms of reliability, latency, and failure modes
• You’re comfortable making trade-offs and explaining them clearly

Collaboration

• Able to work closely with product, design, and other engineers
• Clear communicator who takes ownership and follows things through
• A want to be in-person, near the customer

Nice to have

• Experience working with LLMs or AI infrastructure
• Exposure to agent-based systems or RAG pipelines
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001)
• Basic understanding of frontend or mobile stacks (Flutter, Vue)

$2,000 Tech & Education budget

Complimentary Oura ring or Whoop

Complimentary longevity testing subscription

Lifestyle perks, events, and access opportunities

Full health benefits; 90% coverage, including full dental & vision

Complimentary dinners and evening transport

15 Flexible remote days per year