Senior Backend Software Engineer (12-month FTC) in London

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life.

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re 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.

Depop is looking for an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer to join us within our Platform Pillar, working on the team that owns and evolves Depop’s core APIs and services. The Platform Pillar is part of Depop’s enablement function, responsible for building and running the internal foundations that help Depop engineers ship software safely, confidently, and efficiently.

This team owns and manages Depop’s core application, which sits at the heart of the platform and is responsible for managing critical user and product data. It is a foundational part of Depop’s technology estate, supporting many of the experiences used by buyers, sellers, and internal teams across the business.

This is a unique opportunity to help shape the technical direction of one of Depop’s most important backend systems. You’ll be working on highly impactful platform problems, improving scalability and reliability, reducing technical risk, and helping define how Depop’s core systems evolve for years to come.

You’ll be building and improving backend services, influencing architectural direction, and working with a collaborative, supportive team that values good engineering and good people in equal measure.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Platform Engineers, Security Engineers, Data Engineers, and other backend teams to understand problems and design effective solutions.
• Produce high-quality code that is well-structured, reliable, maintainable, and simple to understand, supporting systems used by millions of Depop users.
• Take ownership of platform and product development, from technical discovery and problem definition through to the breakdown of work and implementation.
• Contribute to high-level architectural thinking, helping to set the long-term technical direction for Depop’s core application and associated platform services.
• Improve the scalability, reliability, observability, and operational safety of critical backend systems.
• Work on foundational platform capabilities, including core backend systems, service-to-service communication, authentication, infrastructure architecture, messaging, database scalability, deployment tooling, and internal engineering enablement.
• Help evolve Depop’s core application so it remains safe, performant, and fit for future product and engineering needs.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders across engineering, product, security, data, and infrastructure, translating technical complexity into shared understanding and actionable plans.
• Support applications end to end, including production incident management, debugging, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Embrace agile methodologies, user-centred thinking, and a pragmatic approach to solving real business and engineering problems.
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by participating in blameless post-mortems, architecture reviews, engineering guild sessions, and technical strategy discussions.
• Collaborate daily with fellow engineers in a cross-functional environment to solve complex problems and write high-quality code.
• Mentor and support the growth of colleagues, identifying opportunities to share knowledge and strengthen team skill sets.
• Own your code, workflows, services, and data through their entire lifecycle.

Must Haves

• Solid software engineering experience, with strong evidence of the ability to learn and work effectively in the team’s Scala and Python stack.
• A strong backend engineering background, including experience designing, building, testing, and operating production services.
• Willingness to work across multiple paradigms and languages, including backend, platform, and data-oriented work.
• Strong technical and non-technical communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to different audiences.
• Proficiency in testing solutions at different levels, including unit and integration testing.
• Experience with relational or non-relational databases.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration technologies.
• Experience working on production systems where reliability, scalability, and maintainability are critical.
• Ability to proactively identify and solve complex technical problems independently, while knowing when to seek guidance or collaborate with peers.

Desired Experience

• Experience writing high-quality backend code in Scala, TypeScript, Python, or another JVM language.
• Experience working with large, business-critical backend applications or platform systems.
• Experience with databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or DynamoDB.
• Experience building scalable web applications or backend systems handling significant traffic and data volume.
• Experience improving reliability, scalability, observability, and operational maturity in production systems.
• Experience working in a DevOps culture, including CI/CD pipelines, observability, incident response, and production ownership.
• Experience working on platform capabilities that support other engineering teams, such as shared services, deployment tooling, infrastructure abstractions, or internal developer workflows.
• A product-oriented and platform-minded approach, with a focus on solving real engineering and business problems rather than over-engineering solutions.

Bonus Points

• Experience with the Play Framework.
• Experience working on platform engineering, internal developer platforms, or core infrastructure systems.
• Experience with large monoliths, service extraction, or modernisation of legacy backend systems.
• Experience with eCommerce or marketplace platforms.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, preferably using Kafka.
• Experience using production AWS infrastructure, ideally with Terraform.
• Experience with data engineering.
• Experience with service-to-service authentication, internal platform security, or cloud cost management.
• Experience enabling AI platform capabilities or building guardrails for safe AI adoption.

Additional Information

• Health + Mental Wellbeing: PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa, subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space, Cycle to Work scheme, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support.
• Work/Life Balance: 25 days annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days, flexible working options.
• 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: Development discussions to support continuous learning and professional growth.
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary), pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva.