Senior Backend Engineer - Payments

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.

Mission & Diversity Statement

Our mission is to make fashion circular and 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. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

Job Description

Depop is looking for an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer to join us permanently.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Product Designers, and various Engineers to understand problems and to design solutions.
• Produce high‑quality code that is well‑structured and simple to understand that will be used by 1M+ active daily users.
• Take ownership of product development, from feature discovery, to the breakdown of work, and its implementation.
• End‑to‑end application support, including production incident management.
• Embrace agile methodologies and user‑centred thinking.
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as blameless post‑mortems, architecture reviews, and engineering guild sessions.
• Collaborate on a daily basis with fellow engineers in the cross‑functional environment to solve problems and write code.
• Mentor and coach your colleagues.
• Own your code, workflows and data through their entire lifecycle.

Desired experience

• Writing high quality code in TypeScript, Scala, Java, Kotlin or another JVM language.
• Relational databases, ideally Postgres.
• NoSQL datastores (e.g. DynamoDB).
• Stream processing (e.g. Kafka).
• Experience building scalable web applications serving 10,000s of requests per second.
• DevOps culture.
• Ability to proactively find and solve complex problems independently, but also know when to seek guidance or help from your 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 Scala stack effectively. We use TypeScript and Scala.
• Willing to work across multiple paradigms and languages, such as backend or data work, using Scala and Python.
• Strong technical and non‑technical communication skills.
• Proficient in testing solutions at different levels, unit and integration.
• Experience with relational or non‑relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar.

Bonus points

• Experience with payment SDKs (Stripe, PayPal, or similar).
• Experience in marketplace or fintech environments.
• Experience with Play framework.
• Experience with eCommerce.
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, preferably using Kafka.
• Experience in using production AWS infrastructure, ideally with Terraform.
• Experience with Python.
• Experience with data engineering.

Additional information

• Health + Mental Wellbeing: PMI and cash plan 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 of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days.
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering.
• Fully paid 4‑week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office‑Based, and Remote options *role‑dependent.
• All offices are dog‑friendly.
• Family Life: For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees. For non‑birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees. IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave.
• Learn + Grow: Twice‑yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews, learning budget, upskilling our employees with company‑wide training workshops, materials and resources.
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary), pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva.
• Depop Extras: In‑office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery. Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!