Backend Developer - AI Team in Manchester

About the role

As a Backend Developer within the AI team, you will support the design, development, and ongoing evolution of our core backend services, APIs, and data processing pipelines. You will play a key role in enabling rapid experimentation while ensuring that successful prototypes can be hardened and scaled into production‑grade systems. This is a role suited to someone who is comfortable operating with a high degree of independence, taking ownership of systems end‑to‑end, and making pragmatic engineering decisions in a fast‑moving environment. You will work closely with data scientists, product stakeholders, infrastructure engineers, and frontend developers across multiple projects in parallel. We are open to candidates ranging from mid to senior level. The scope of responsibilities can flex depending on experience and interests, with clear opportunities for rapid progression and significant professional growth for motivated candidates as the team and product portfolio grow.

Main Responsibilities

• Take ownership of backend services and applications that support the development, testing, deployment, and monitoring of ML‑enabled products.
• Contribute to infrastructure and architecture decisions by developing a strong understanding of business and product needs.
• Maintain and extend existing, and build new APIs to support evolving product requirements.
• Collaborate closely with product, data science, infrastructure, and frontend teams to deliver end‑to‑end solutions.
• Work directly with internal users and stakeholders to scope, prioritise, and resolve issues and bugs.
• Enable ML development through efficient and scalable data integrations from diverse sources, including case management systems, unstructured documents (Word, PDF), and SQL databases.

Required Skills and Experience

• Strong proficiency in Python, with experience designing and building backend systems and web apps (proficiency with at least one Python web framework is desirable).
• Comfort operating in a fast‑paced production environment where deployments have direct user impact.
• 3+ years experience as a software developer, backend engineer, or Python developer. Strong candidates with less should still apply.
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision, demonstrating strong ownership, prioritisation, and delivery focus.
• Strong communication skills and sound engineering judgement.
• Based in the UK, with the ability to attend in‑person team meetings approximately once per month.
• Fluency in English.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience designing and deploying infrastructure (e.g. cloud environments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, secure networking, or databases).
• Start‑up or greenfield experience, particularly building backend systems or data environments from scratch.
• Experience operating with solutions at scale.
• 'Product engineer' experience.
• Exposure to frontend technologies (e.g. TypeScript, React).
• Previous experience with Azure.
• Familiarity with Machine Learning concepts and workflows.

Office Location

This role can be primarily remote, with in‑person meetings around once per month in Manchester or Liverpool. Fletchers has offices in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bolton, Southport, Newcastle, Reading, Birmingham, Northampton, and Cambridge. Many colleagues work primarily from home. The existing AI team is distributed across London, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge, and Bristol, and we typically meet in person once or twice per month in Manchester.

Benefits

• 35 hours working week.
• Bonus scheme (subject to targets being met).
• 35 days holiday a year including bank holidays and Christmas Closure, with an option to purchase up to 3 extra days per year, and a long‑service award of 3 days after the 5th, 7th, and 9th full year of employment.
• Pension scheme with tax‑efficient salary sacrifice option.
• Life Assurance Policy.
• Medicash policy to cover some dental, optical and other medical expenses.
• Company sick pay.
• Enhanced Maternity, Paternity and IVF schemes.
• Flexible, agile working environment with a positive work‑life balance.
• Varied calendar of funded company social events.
• Monthly voucher awards for winning nominees.
• A genuinely supportive and friendly culture.
• Ongoing training and professional development opportunities.

We reserve the right to close this role before the date specified depending on the calibre and volume of candidates.