Senior Python Developer

A specialist sports modelling and trading technology business is seeking a Senior Python Backend Engineer to join its platform team on an initial six-month contract. The role focuses on a business-critical web scraping project to expand access to external liquidity providers and real-time market data. You will build reliable, low-latency services that collect, process and distribute data from external platforms, including systems that may not provide stable or conventional APIs.

This position offers an opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys technically challenging work involving web scraping, reverse engineering, real-time data, imperfect third-party integrations and production systems where speed, correctness and reliability matter. You will work within a small, highly capable engineering team and take ownership of services with direct commercial impact.

• Building and maintaining high-performance web scraping and data collection services using Python and asyncio
• Reverse engineering websites, network requests and third-party platforms to identify reliable methods of accessing real-time data
• Developing low-latency data feeds that integrate with internal trading systems
• Designing resilient services that respond to changes in external websites and data sources
• Managing challenges such as session handling, authentication, rate limits, retries, timeouts and changing page structures
• Creating stable internal interfaces that shield the wider trading platform from unreliable external systems
• Working with distributed systems, event-driven architecture and high-throughput messaging
• Improving observability using structured logging, latency metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, heartbeats and alerting
• Contributing to architectural decisions and the technical direction of the project
• Supporting engineering quality through code reviews, documentation and knowledge sharing

• Strong backend engineering experience using Python
• Commercial experience building web scraping, data extraction or automated data collection systems
• Experience working with asynchronous Python, ideally using asyncio
• An understanding of browser behaviour, HTTP, APIs, authentication, cookies, sessions and network requests
• Experience reverse engineering websites or undocumented third-party integrations
• Knowledge of distributed systems, messaging platforms or event-driven architecture
• A thoughtful approach to reliability, resilience and operational behaviour
• Strong judgement around architecture, maintainability and pragmatic delivery
• Confidence working with business-critical production systems
• Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Experience with trading systems, real-time data feeds, low-latency services, browser automation or rapidly changing third-party platforms would be particularly relevant.

The wider technology environment includes: Python, asyncio, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, LXD Containers, Ansible and OpenTelemetry, alongside modern AI engineering tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.

Initial six-month contract, £500 per day, Outside IR35, London-based hybrid working.

For a Senior Python Backend Engineer who wants to work at the sharp end of real-time trading technology, this is an opportunity to deliver a technically complex web scraping project where performance, reliability and correctness genuinely matter.