Software Engineer (Backend)

Join ExTrac.ai as a Backend Software Engineer to build and operate the backend microservices needed for complex data analysis.

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to build and ship production-grade services, and experience owning features or components end to end within a larger system.
• Proficiency in building microservices using Go or Python, with the ability to pick up the other quickly.
• Practical understanding of software engineering patterns.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills. Comfortable writing clear technical documentation and discussing requirements with colleagues from engineering and the wider team.
• Interest across the stack: an interest in deployment pipelines, database behaviour, and security engineering.
• An interest in how the product is actually used, and a willingness to take analyst feedback into requirements discussions rather than treating requirements as someone else's problem.
• Currently working with Go-based microservices.
• Experience with Elasticsearch and/or PostgreSQL.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code, and with the CI/CD pipelines around them.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven pipelines.
• Experience with feature flags and trunk-based development. Features land close to weekly, and individual deploys go out several times a day across several projects.
• Experience working in software for defence, government, or other compliance-constrained environments.

• Competitive salary based on skills and experience.
• A generous benefits package, including Private Medical Health Insurance and enhanced pension contributions.
• Enhanced parental leave and a workplace nursery scheme.
• £500/year education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
• 33 days of leave across the year inclusive of bank holidays.
• Flexible working, with the opportunity to spend up to 3 days a week remotely alongside regular days with our team in our central London office.
• • £75K – £80K

• You have built and worked on production backend systems. You will spend your time working on Go and Python services, databases, and APIs, and you know the difference between something that works on a laptop and something that holds up under production load, latency, and cost.
• You can work independently on well-defined problems, and know when to flag ambiguity or ask for input rather than guessing. When the obvious approach fails, you look for another one before escalating.
• You are happy to take the initiative in order to complete a task, whether that means learning a new skill, reaching out to stakeholders to clarify requirements, or suggesting an alternate approach.
• You treat quality, security, and observability as engineering fundamentals rather than optional extras, and you flag technical debt rather than letting it accumulate silently.
• You actively seek feedback and act on it, and you look for opportunities to pair with and learn from the engineers around you.
• You want to work on things that matter. Our software sits underneath decisions taken by governments, defence organisations, and institutions operating where being wrong or late carries real consequences.