Junior Python Developer in Slough

Location: UK

Experience: 2–10 years

Education: Master's in Science (IT/Computer Science/Engineer)

Employment Type: Full-Time

UK based candidates only.

About the Role

We are looking for a Python Full Stack Developer to design, build, and ship production-grade web applications end to end — from a FastAPI backend and PostgreSQL data layer through to a modern React + TypeScript frontend, containerised with Docker and orchestrated on Kubernetes, and deployed and monitored across cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP). You will own features across the full stack: modelling data, exposing secure and well-documented APIs, building responsive interfaces, writing tests, and pushing your work to production through automated CI/CD pipelines. This is a hands-on engineering role suited to someone who is comfortable across the entire delivery lifecycle and takes pride in shipping secure, observable, well-tested software.

Key Responsibilities

• Strong hands-on experience in Python, Tableau & Data Mining experience.
• Design and build RESTful APIs with FastAPI — routing, request/response validation, dependency injection, middleware, and auto-generated OpenAPI documentation.
• Develop relational data models with SQLAlchemy (async) and manage schema evolution with Alembic migrations.
• Build responsive, accessible user interfaces in React with TypeScript, using modern hooks, client-side routing, and form validation.
• Implement secure authentication and authorisation — JWT access/refresh tokens, OAuth2 / OpenID Connect, password hashing, role- and scope-based access control (RBAC), and token revocation.
• Manage server state and data fetching on the frontend with TanStack Query, and application state with a lightweight store such as Zustand.
• Work with PostgreSQL and Redis for persistence, caching, rate-limiting, and background task coordination.
• Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests (pytest, Vitest, React Testing Library, Playwright) and maintain healthy test coverage.
• Containerise services with Docker (multi-stage builds) and deploy/orchestrate them on Kubernetes — Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps/Secrets, autoscaling, health probes — or on the cloud-native equivalents (AWS EKS/ECS, Azure AKS/Container Apps, GCP GKE/Cloud Run).
• Provision and ship infrastructure and releases across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) through automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), using managed identity / IAM and cloud secret stores rather than hard-coded credentials.
• Monitor application performance and reliability — profiling, query optimisation, structured logging, error tracking, and tracing.
• Collaborate on clean, secure code through code review, conventional Git workflows, and adherence to OWASP and secrets-management best practices.

Required Skills & Experience

Backend

• Strong Python fundamentals, including async/await (asyncio) and modern tooling (uv / poetry, virtual environments).
• Hands-on experience building APIs with FastAPI and data validation with Pydantic / pydantic-settings.
• Proficiency with SQLAlchemy (ORM, relationships, eager loading) and Alembic migrations.
• Solid PostgreSQL skills — query design, indexing, and reading EXPLAIN/ANALYZE output — plus Redis for caching and token storage.

Frontend

• Proficiency with React and TypeScript, including hooks, component composition, and React Router.
• Experience with form handling and validation (React Hook Form + Zod) and data fetching with TanStack Query.
• Comfort with a modern build toolchain (Vite), HTML5, CSS (Flexbox/Grid), and JavaScript ES6+.

Authentication & Authorisation

• Hands-on experience implementing JWT-based auth (access + refresh tokens) and OAuth2 / OpenID Connect flows.
• Secure password handling (bcrypt / passlib), token revocation, and session/token storage in Redis.
• Role-based and scope-based access control (RBAC), protecting routes and enforcing least-privilege.
• Familiarity with cloud identity providers and managed identity — AWS IAM / Cognito, Azure Entra ID, and GCP IAM.

Containers & Orchestration

• Proficiency with Docker — multi-stage builds, slim/non-root images, docker-compose, and image scanning (trivy).
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes — Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps/Secrets, liveness/readiness probes, and horizontal autoscaling.
• Experience deploying to managed Kubernetes or container platforms: AWS EKS / ECS / App Runner, Azure AKS / Container Apps, or GCP GKE / Cloud Run.
• Container registries and image promotion (ECR, ACR, Artifact Registry, GHCR).

Cloud Platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP)

• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform, with willingness to work across all three:
• AWS — EC2, S3, RDS (PostgreSQL), ElastiCache, CloudFront, Route 53, SQS, IAM, CloudWatch.
• Azure — Container Apps / AKS, Blob Storage, Database for PostgreSQL, Cache for Redis, Key Vault, Service Bus, Entra ID, Azure Monitor.
• GCP — GKE / Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL), Memorystore, Pub/Sub, Secret Manager, Cloud IAM, Cloud Monitoring & Logging.
• Cloud secret management and credential-free auth (Key Vault, Secrets Manager, Secret Manager, workload/managed identity).

Testing & DevOps

• CI/CD with GitHub Actions — lint, test, build, scan, and deploy pipelines with matrix builds and caching.
• Automated testing across the stack: pytest (with pytest-asyncio), Vitest / React Testing Library, and Playwright for E2E.
• Familiarity with observability tooling — structured logging, error tracking (e.g. Sentry), and tracing (e.g. OpenTelemetry / Jaeger).
• Sound version control practices with Git and GitHub (branching, pull requests, conventional commits).

Nice to Have

• Experience with background processing and messaging (Celery, SQS, Pub/Sub, or Azure Service Bus) and real-time features (WebSockets / SSE).
• Production experience across more than one cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) or in a multi-cloud / hybrid setup.
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or Bicep) and Kubernetes package management with Helm.
• Security awareness — OWASP Top 10, dependency and secrets scanning (bandit, pip-audit, trivy).
• Performance profiling experience (py-spy, cProfile) and frontend bundle optimisation.
• Experience generating typed API clients (e.g. openapi-typescript) for end-to-end type safety.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
• 2–10 years of professional software development experience across backend and frontend.
• A portfolio, GitHub profile, or shipped projects demonstrating full-stack delivery.