Backend Engineer in London

Company Overview

Depop is the community‑powered circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover desirable secondhand fashion. With a community of over 35 million users, Depop is on a mission to make fashion circular, redefining fashion consumption. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Manchester, and in 2021 became a wholly‑owned subsidiary of Etsy. We are proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

Role Overview

Depop is looking for an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join us permanently. Within this role, you’ll work in a cross‑functional team in partnership with mobile, web and machine learning/data science teams to drive the team to success.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, Front‑End and other Backend Engineers to understand problems and design solutions.
• Produce high‑quality code that is well‑structured and simple to understand, to be used by 1M+ active daily users.
• Embrace agile methodologies.
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as blameless post‑mortems, architecture reviews, etc.
• Collaborate on a daily basis with fellow engineers in the cross‑functional environment to solve problems and write code.
• Own, code, workflows and data through their entire lifecycle.
• Document any feature development.

Desired Experience

• Writing high‑quality code in Scala, Java, Kotlin or another JVM language.
• Experience building scalable applications serving 10,000s of requests per second.
• Relational databases, ideally Postgres.
• NoSQL datastores (e.g. DynamoDB).
• Stream processing (e.g. Kafka).
• DevOps culture (CI/CD pipeline).
• Ability to proactively find and solve complex problems independently, but also know when to seek guidance or help from peers.
• Product‑oriented mindset with a focus on solving real business problems rather than over‑engineering solutions.
• Experience with iterative development using A/B testing.

Must Haves

• Solid software engineering experience.
• Strong evidence that you can learn our TypeScript and Scala stack effectively.
• Willing to work across multiple paradigms and languages, such as backend or data work, using TypeScript, Scala and Python.
• Proficient in testing solutions at different levels — unit, integration, etc.
• Experience with relational or non‑relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.

Bonus Points

• Experience with eCommerce.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, preferably using RabbitMQ or Kafka.
• Experience using production AWS infrastructure, ideally with Terraform.
• Experience with Python.
• Experience with data engineering.

Benefits

• Health + Mental Wellbeing PMI healthcare access with Bupa.
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space.
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative.
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support.
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting.
• Work/Life Balance: 25 days annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days.
• 1 company‑wide day off per quarter.
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days additional paid leave per year for volunteering.
• Fully paid 4‑week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service, to give you a chance to recharge or pursue interests.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office Based, and Remote options *role dependant.
• All offices are dog‑friendly.
• Ability to work abroad for 4 weeks per year in UK tax treaty countries.
• Family Life: 18 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees; IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave.
• Learn + Grow: Budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions, and more; mentorship and programmes to upskill employees.
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary); Pension matching up to 6% of qualifying earnings.
• Depop Extras: Employees enjoy free shipping on their Depop sales within the UK; special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards.

Contact & Application Note

We are continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have. If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application.

For any non‑disability related questions, please reach out to our Talent Partners.