Staff Backend Engineer

 

Description:

You will work closely with multiple product squads, other Staff and Backend engineers, and product & engineering leaders, providing deep technical expertise to ensure our Payment and Fulfilment systems are scalable, secure, observable, and fit for our future growth ambitions.

Responsibilities
 

  • Partner with senior collaborators across Product, Engineering, Finance and Ops to translate strategic goals into well-architected, scalable platform capabilities.
  • Drive the technical design and implementation of key Payments and Fulfilment features, providing hands-on coding and architectural leadership.
  • Define and evolve the technical roadmap for our Payments and Fulfilment systems, ensuring they’re extensible for Product squads, and simple for engineers to work with.
  • Champion engineering excellence, setting high technical standards and advocating for best practices in system design, maintainability, performance, and building for speed.
  • Lead efforts to evangelise and generate consensus for why the technical work in this area is of high importance.
  • Mentor and coach engineers, elevating the technical capabilities of the teams around you and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
  • Identify and address complex technical challenges and bottlenecks, proposing and implementing effective solutions.
     

Qualifications

You’ll be an excellent fit if you have:
 

  • Experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role working across the Backend at scale, ideally in a consumer or marketplace environment.
  • Deep expertise in designing, building, and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale.
  • Exceptional programming skills in Scala, Java, or TypeScript, with deep cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
  • Familiarity with event-driven architectures using Kafka.
  • A strong technical background with a track record of hands-on architecture and development of complex backend systems.
  • Ability to think strategically and pragmatically: you can define long-term technical strategies and implement rapidly, bringing others along with you.
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills; you’re comfortable influencing technical direction and aligning diverse stakeholders across the organisation.
     

Bonus Points If
 

  • You’ve previous experience in Fulfilment or Payments, including integration with vendors such as Stripe, PayPal, or shipping providers.
  • Prior work in fashion, marketplaces, fintech, or sustainability-driven tech.
     

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing
 

  • PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
  • Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
  • Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
  • Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
  • Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting
     

Work/Life Balance
 

  • 25 days annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days
  • 1 company-wide day off per quarter
  • Impact hours: Up to 2 days additional paid leave per year for volunteering
  • Fully paid 4 week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
  • Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office Based, and Remote options *role dependant
  • All offices are dog-friendly
  • Ability to work abroad for 4 weeks per year in UK tax treaty countries

Organization Depop
Industry IT / Telecom / Software Jobs
Occupational Category Staff Backend Engineer
Job Location London,UK
Shift Type Morning
Job Type Full Time
Gender No Preference
Career Level Intermediate
Experience 2 Years
Posted at 2026-02-21 4:25 pm
Expires on 2026-04-07