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For Companies At a Glance
- Tasks: Join us to architect and scale our distributed reporting engine for movie theatres.
- Company: INDY powers cinema operations globally, handling millions of tickets yearly with a nimble team.
- Benefits: Enjoy remote work flexibility, direct impact on projects, and a collaborative environment.
- Why this job: Make a visible impact on millions of moviegoers while owning your projects from start to finish.
- Qualifications: 5+ years in backend systems, deep Ruby/Rails expertise, and hands-on MySQL tuning experience required.
- Other info: Work closely with founders and domain experts in a tight-knit crew.
The predicted salary is between 48000 - 84000 £ per year.
Location: Remote (Global)
Team Size: ≈ 10 engineers
Core Stack: Ruby on Rails (API-only), Sidekiq, MySQL, AWS (EC2, RDS, EFS), Highcharts.js (data consumers)
About INDY
INDY powers every operational layer of a movie theater—from ticket sales and concessions to scheduling, accounting, and real-time business intelligence. Our platform handles tens of millions of tickets a year across cinemas worldwide, yet we remain a nimble team where each engineer’s work is felt immediately in theaters on six continents.
Why This Role Exists
Our home-grown reporting platform is the analytical backbone of INDY. It decomposes incoming queries into thousands of parallel Sidekiq jobs (hourly → daily → weekly → monthly roll-ups) and serves the results back to cinema managers in seconds. As volume soars, we need a backend-focused engineer to:
- Own and harden this distributed reporting engine.
- Design data pipelines that can ingest years of transactional data and still answer ad-hoc questions quickly.
- You will partner with—but not be accountable for—front-end engineers who wire these APIs into Vue-based dashboards.
What You’ll Do
- Architect & Scale
- Profile, partition, and optimize multi-terabyte MySQL schemas.
- Tune Sidekiq queues, worker pools, and EC2 autoscaling groups for bursty loads.
- Refactor long-running jobs into idempotent, parallelizable units.
- Implement validation, audit trails, and automated backfills.
- Instrument metrics/alerting around throughput, latency, and cost.
- Expose clean GraphQL/REST contracts that power accounting tools for film bookings, revenue splits, and studio payouts.
- Introduce domain-specific abstractions (DSLs, helpers) so other engineers can add new report types rapidly.
- Work with infra engineers on Terraform-managed AWS resources.
- Pair with front-end devs to ensure APIs are ergonomic and secure.
- Advise product and finance teams on data-model trade-offs.
What We’re Looking For
Must-Have
- 5+ yrs building high-throughput backend systems
- Deep Ruby/Rails & ActiveRecord expertise
- Hands-on MySQL tuning (indexes, partitioning, query plans)
- Proven record scaling background-job frameworks (Sidekiq, Resque, Celery, etc.)
- AWS production experience (EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC)
Nice-to-Have
- Experience with BI/reporting engines or OLAP stores
- Exposure to ClickHouse/Redshift/BigQuery
- Event-driven or stream processing (Kafka, Kinesis)
- Familiarity with data-viz pipelines (we use Highcharts.js)
- Contributions to OSS or tech-blog posts on performance
What Success Looks Like (6-12 Months)
- Daily report-generation latency cut by 50 % while data volume doubles.
- Zero-downtime schema migrations and automated backfill strategy in place.
- First phase of studio-settlement APIs shipped and adopted by finance ops.
- Comprehensive dashboards/alerts proactively surface scaling limits before customers notice.
Why INDY Rocks
- Massive Visible Impact – Your optimizations ripple out to millions of moviegoers.
- Start-to-Finish Ownership – No layers of bureaucracy; ship, measure, iterate.
- Technically Spicy – Distributed computing meets real-world financial correctness.
- Tight-Knit Crew – Collaborate directly with founders and domain experts.
Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure employer: INDY
Contact Detail:
INDY Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure
✨Tip Number 1
Familiarise yourself with the core technologies mentioned in the job description, especially Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Consider building a small project or contributing to an open-source project that uses these technologies to demonstrate your hands-on experience.
✨Tip Number 2
Network with current or former employees of INDY through platforms like LinkedIn. Engaging in conversations about their experiences can provide valuable insights into the company culture and expectations, which you can leverage during interviews.
✨Tip Number 3
Prepare to discuss specific examples of how you've optimised backend systems in the past. Be ready to explain your thought process and the impact of your work, as this role requires a strong focus on performance and scalability.
✨Tip Number 4
Stay updated on the latest trends in distributed computing and data infrastructure. Being knowledgeable about new tools and methodologies can set you apart and show your commitment to continuous learning, which is highly valued at INDY.
We think you need these skills to ace Senior Backend Engineer – Distributed Reporting & Data Infrastructure
Some tips for your application 🫡
Tailor Your CV: Make sure your CV highlights your experience with backend systems, particularly in Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Emphasise any relevant projects or roles that demonstrate your ability to handle high-throughput systems and distributed reporting.
Craft a Compelling Cover Letter: In your cover letter, explain why you're passionate about the role at INDY. Mention specific aspects of their platform and how your skills align with their needs, such as your experience with Sidekiq or AWS.
Showcase Relevant Projects: If you have worked on similar projects, include links to your GitHub or portfolio. Highlight any contributions to open-source projects or tech blogs that showcase your expertise in backend engineering and performance optimisation.
Prepare for Technical Questions: Be ready to discuss your technical skills in detail. Prepare examples of how you've optimised database performance, managed data integrity, or scaled backend systems in previous roles. This will help you stand out during the interview process.
How to prepare for a job interview at INDY
✨Showcase Your Technical Expertise
Be prepared to discuss your experience with Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Sidekiq in detail. Highlight specific projects where you've optimised backend systems or handled high-throughput data processing, as this will demonstrate your capability to manage the responsibilities of the role.
✨Understand the Company’s Product
Familiarise yourself with INDY's platform and how it operates within the movie theatre ecosystem. Understanding their reporting engine and how it serves cinema managers will help you articulate how your skills can directly contribute to their success.
✨Prepare for System Design Questions
Expect to tackle system design scenarios during the interview. Be ready to discuss how you would architect scalable data pipelines and optimise MySQL schemas, as well as how you would ensure data integrity and observability in a high-load environment.
✨Demonstrate Collaboration Skills
Since the role involves working closely with front-end engineers and other teams, be prepared to share examples of past collaborations. Discuss how you’ve effectively communicated technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and how you’ve contributed to cross-functional projects.
