Backend Software Engineer (Remote, UK)

About Esenda  

Esenda powers over £1.5bn of inbound and outbound payments annually, in the education space - from tuition and catering fees to supplier payments and payroll. 

We’re a revenue-generating startup with strong product-market fit, and we’re growing fast. 

Join us now and you’ll work on impactful features that directly shape our platform and make a real difference to our customers. 

What you’ll do  

• Design, build, and ship reliable backend services and APIs in Python (Flask) that power core product functionality. 
• Own features end-to-end: data modelling (Postgres), API design, testing, production rollout and ongoing improvements.
• Help uphold strong engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, testing discipline, clean architecture, and pragmatic decision-making. 
• Improve service reliability and operability: monitoring, alerting, logging, runbooks, and reducing on-call toil over time. 
• Work closely with the technical team to scope product ideas, focused on delivering customer-facing outcomes (not just “tickets”). 
• Contribute to delivery practices: CI/CD improvements, incremental shipping, and maintaining a high-quality codebase. 
• You’ll join an on-call rotation (1 week in 4) compensation: paid as an extra £300 per on-call week. 

What we’re looking for  

• 5+ years experience building and operating production backend systems. 
• Strong experience with Python, and hands-on use of Flask (or similar frameworks). 
• Solid understanding of Postgres (schemas, migrations, query performance, transactions). 
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs (REST; event-driven experience is a plus). 
• Comfortable shipping in cloud environments—ideally AWS—and working with modern CI/CD pipelines. 
• A strong quality mindset: you care about maintainability, security, reliability, and clear documentation.

Bonus points for  

• Payments/fintech knowledge (reconciliation, idempotency, auditability, ledger concepts). 
• Experience with distributed systems patterns (queues, background jobs, retries, rate limiting). 
• Security experience (threat modelling, OWASP-style concerns, secure API design). 
• Familiarity with Terraform. 

Why join us? 

• £60k salary + equity 
• 40 days holiday (incl. bank holidays)
• Pension scheme (3% employer contribution)
• Fully remote, UK-based, with 3 in-person meetups per year 
• A transparent, collaborative, and supportive culture 

Our stack (today) 

• Backend: Python, Flask 
• Data: Postgres 
• Cloud: AWS 
• Edge: Cloudflare 
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform 
• Delivery: CI/CD, automated testing, observability tooling 

How we work  

• Pragmatic, high-ownership teams with a bias to shipping 
• Clear communication, strong collaboration, and continuous improvement 
• Code reviews and sensible standards that keep quality high without slowing delivery 

Interview process

• 30-min intro call (role fit, values, ways of working) 
• Practical exercise (small take-home or pairing session) 
• Technical interview (backend fundamentals, API design, production thinking) 
• Team chat + Q&A