Lead Back End Developer - Contract role - London Overview A growing, data-driven organisation is looking for a Lead Back End Developer to shape and deliver the services that sit at the heart of its platform. You’ll lead a team of engineers, own technical direction and stay hands-on in the code. The stack is flexible (Python, C# and others), so strong engineering fundamentals matter more than any one language. Responsibilities Lead the design and build of scalable, secure back end services and APIs Own the architecture of event-driven pipelines built on Kafka Set engineering standards across code quality, testing, CI/CD and documentation Mentor developers, run code reviews and guide technical decisions Work with product and data teams to turn requirements into reliable services Make sure systems meet security and data protection expectations Monitor, troubleshoot and improve performance and reliability in production Skills and Experience Strong commercial back end experience in Python, C#/.NET or a comparable language Proven experience designing, building and versioning APIs (REST, and ideally gRPC or GraphQL) Hands-on Kafka experience, including topic design, producers and consumers, and stream processing Experience leading or mentoring engineers, or acting as a technical lead Solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) Details £650 - £750 P/D (Inside IR35) Hybrid role - 2 days P/W onsite Initial 6 Month contract