Senior Backend Engineer

Introduction

The Economist Group: where people drive progress

At The Economist Group, we champion progress by helping people understand and tackle the critical challenges facing the world. Join us to engineer innovative products that bring insight and analysis to global leaders in business and government. Whether ideating mobile apps that deliver personalised content or evolving our flagship website, economist.com, you will help transform how we acquire, convert, engage and retain our 1.2 million subscribers.

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our dynamic AI Platform Engineering team. Your primary focus will be to design, develop, deploy, and maintain the core infrastructure that powers our AI-driven products and services. You’ll play a key role in ensuring the scalability, reliability, and performance of our AI platform.

In this role, you’ll collaborate closely with our talented team, where your expertise in cloud infrastructure, API development, and AI/ML integration will be highly valued. Your insights into platform architecture and the latest advancements in AI technologies will help shape the future of our AI capabilities.

This is an exciting opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI initiatives, contribute to impactful projects, and be part of a team that is driving innovation in the AI space.

The role will suit either an existing senior or a mid-level native Web Fullstack Engineer ready for their next challenge, but with at least some experience mentoring a high-performing team. You should enjoy working with autonomy in a creative and entrepreneurial environment and have a strong commitment to producing high-quality code. We offer flexible working and have recently shifted to a 'remote first' working policy with a minimum expectation of coming to the office two days a month; however, you can come in more often if you wish.

Accountabilities

How you will contribute:

• Take technical responsibility for all stages in the software development life cycle.
• Take ownership of your code in production, including creating and managing observability, alerts, and FinOps dashboards.
• Work with our Enablement, InfoSec, and Support teams to ensure your code is secure, well-documented, and supportable.
• Work closely with our stakeholders (the other engineering teams) to ensure their needs are met and that they are educated and informed as to what services we have made available.
• Write maintainable, scalable, high-performance code.
• Configure and deploy open-source products to support our custom solutions.

Experience, skills and professional attributes

What you’ll need to be successful:

• 5+ years of professional experience in backend development with proficiency in some of the following programming languages: Go, Python, Java, Javascript/Typescript.
• Professional experience with AWS and its various services, including building and deploying applications in a cloud environment.
• Experience with API development, including building and maintaining API gateways as a service to other engineers.
• Understanding of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) concepts and experience in applying them to AI/ML applications.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks such as CDK and Terraform.
• Proficiency in building automated CI/CD pipelines and deploying them into AWS (experience with CircleCI is a plus).
• Experience in building containerized and FaaS services to enhance scalability and efficiency.
• Deep understanding of scalable web infrastructure, including API gateways, load balancers, WAFs, and CDNs.
• Familiarity with web technologies like React is a plus, particularly if you’ve worked with or have a strong understanding of UI/UX concerns.
• You value well-thought-out and straightforward solutions to complex problems.
• Mentorship experience - you’ll have been seen as a go-to person in your last role.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated strong ownership of your work, with a proactive, scrappy, and action-biased approach.

Our culture

We all play a part in building our culture. Whether it's through welcoming new colleagues, team-building activities, joining colleague events, celebrations, or affinity groups, there’s an opportunity for you to get involved. Continuous development is central to our working culture, and we encourage teams to pair up or mob on tasks. From our 10% a week learning time policy to our learning and development platform, Degreed, with unlimited access to Udemy courses, as well as a host of other world-class content providers - there are many ways to develop your skills and career with us.

The Economist Group values diversity. We are committed to equal opportunities and creating an inclusive environment for all our employees. We welcome applicants regardless of ethnic origin, national origin, gender, gender identity, race, colour, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, age, or marital status.