Tech Lead (Python / API Squad)

Design and build production Python services behind our high-traffic public and internal APIs, contributing code whenever the team needs it.

Lead architecture decisions and design reviews across the API platform, including API gateways, authentication, search and real-time data services.

Improve API reliability and operability through testing, monitoring, alerting and incident follow-ups, while strengthening development workflows, CI/CD and automation.

Work with Product and neighbouring engineering squads to define technical interfaces, agree on standards and make pragmatic architectural trade-offs.

Build shared ownership of services through knowledge sharing and clear documentation, ensuring critical systems can be operated and supported by more than one engineer.

Mentor developers through code reviews, pairing and design feedback, balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability.

5+ years of professional Python backend development experience.

Experience designing and operating high-traffic REST APIs, including API versioning, backward compatibility and production incident response.

Experience working with relational and search databases, such as PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, including query performance optimisation.

Experience leading technical decisions, mentoring engineers and facilitating design reviews — with or without a formal leadership title.

Clear communication, pragmatic problem-solving and the ability to navigate changing priorities and collaborate across teams.

Experience with API gateways.

Experience with message queues and asynchronous workers, such as RabbitMQ or Celery.

Familiarity with exposing data APIs to AI agents through MCP, tool calling or similar approaches.

Familiarity with a second programming language.

Experience operating services with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability tools such as GitLab CI, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or Sentry.

Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including idempotency, retries and eventual consistency.

Language & framework: Python, FastAPI

APIs & gateway: REST, Kong

Databases & search: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch

Caching: Redis, Dragonfly

Messaging & event streaming: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda

Infrastructure & deployment: Docker, Kubernetes

CI/CD: GitLab CI

Monitoring & observability: Grafana, OpenTelemetry (OTel), Sentry