This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies. We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process.
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The role
This company builds the control plane for data and AI pipelines, used in production by major enterprises and trusted by a community of over 30,000 data practitioners. They're tackling the fundamental challenge of orchestrating complex data workflows and, increasingly, the emerging world of AI agents. Backed by leading investors, they're growing rapidly in a critical, underserved market.
You'll own the core orchestration engine: the machinery that schedules, executes, and manages state for every pipeline. This isn't a backend role where you hand off infrastructure or QA to other teams; you'll drive features from concept to production, writing the Terraform and debugging what you ship. The team is small, generalist, and focused on the hardest problems, particularly in the nascent AI agent layer.
The work
- Design and build the core orchestration engine: scheduling, execution, state management, retries, concurrency, and cancellation.
- Engineer for highly variable load, ensuring capacity, back‑pressure, and isolation for systems with extreme peak‑to‑average ratios.
- Drive features end-to-end, from initial concept through to production deployment, including infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform) and monitoring.
- Tackle the least‑solved problems in the AI‑native layer, building out the control plane for AI agents.
- Debug complex production failures and optimise systems under real‑world, high‑load conditions.
What You Bring
- Deep production Python experience, having made architectural decisions and understood language edges.
- Proven judgment in distributed systems: retries, idempotency, state machines, queues, and debugging race conditions under load.
- A cloud‑native mindset, treating infrastructure (IaC, serverless) as part of your remit, not someone else’s.
- Strong data modelling instinct, with experience making and learning from critical state persistence decisions.
- A bias to shipping, prioritising impact and knowing when to iterate versus gold‑plate.
- Eligibility to work in the UK.
Why apply through Dex
This isn't a generic backend role. It's a high‑ownership seat at a company building critical infrastructure for data and AI, tackling genuinely hard problems.
Backend Engineer (up to £120k) employer: Dex
Join a pioneering early-stage venture-backed company at the forefront of building foundation models for extreme physics, where you will have the unique opportunity to shape the engineering culture from day one. With a strong focus on innovation and collaboration, this role offers competitive compensation, a dynamic work environment, and the chance to contribute to critical advancements in global infrastructure and energy. You'll be part of a small, research-heavy team that values your expertise and encourages personal growth, making it an excellent place for those looking to make a meaningful impact.
