Senior Backend Engineer

About the Position

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Python) to join our UK-based healthcare platform, building scalable and secure services for remote patient monitoring, clinical research, and personalized healthcare. You will own Python services and REST APIs end to end - from discovery through to production - model and evolve the data behind them, and make foundational architectural decisions for a next-generation platform where scalability, security, and privacy are non-negotiable. You will partner closely with frontend, mobile, clinical, and data teammates, set the technical bar for backend code and reliability, and mentor more junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Drive foundational architectural decisions for our next-generation platform, ensuring scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Design, build, and maintain Python services that expose well-documented, versioned REST APIs.
• Model and evolve data with PostgreSQL (and NoSQL where appropriate), including schema migrations and query performance tuning.
• Integrate with internal services and third-party systems (auth, payments, healthcare data sources) with clear contracts and graceful failure modes.
• Design services with security and privacy by default, aligned with global healthcare compliance standards.
• Write thorough automated tests at unit, integration, and contract levels using pytest.
• Add the logging, metrics, and tracing needed to operate services confidently in production.
• Participate in on-call and incident response for owned services, and drive blameless post-mortems and follow-ups.
• Review code with care, pushing for clarity, simplicity, and good test coverage.
• Use AI-assisted development tools effectively to accelerate delivery without compromising quality.
• Document architecture decisions, runbooks, and API contracts so distributed teammates can pick work up easily.
• Partner with product, design, and clinical stakeholders to scope features and trade-offs.
• Mentor more junior backend engineers and help raise the bar on backend practices across teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience shipping production services.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field - or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong, hands-on Python skills, including modern type hints, async patterns, and idiomatic project layout.
• Production experience with at least one major Python web framework (FastAPI, Django, or Flask).
• A proven track record designing, building, and evolving REST APIs (OpenAPI / Swagger), with familiarity with API versioning, pagination, and error-handling conventions.
• Solid SQL skills with PostgreSQL or MySQL - comfortable writing migrations and tuning queries.
• Strong testing habits with pytest across unit, integration, and contract tests.
• Confident with Git, code review, and trunk-based or short-lived-branch workflows.
• Clear written and verbal communication in English, with the ability to work asynchronously across time zones.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in regulated environments (HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or medical-device software).
• Working knowledge of event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Pub/Sub).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation).
• Exposure to observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, Sentry).
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery.
• Background in healthcare, life sciences, or another data-sensitive domain.
• Experience with FHIR, HL7, or other healthcare interoperability standards.
• Performance work on high-throughput or low-latency systems.
• Hands-on experience deploying services to AWS, GCP, or Azure, and shipping changes through a CI/CD pipeline.

We Offer

• An environment where you can deepen your backend expertise while building systems that directly support patient health outcomes.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and a passionate team.
• Professional development opportunities.

About the Company

Sysmetica is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from candidates of all abilities, backgrounds, and experiences.