Salary: £70-80,000 Reports to: Head of IT Location: England, UK Status: FTE About Us Legal Utopia is on a mission to get legal professions to work for everyone. At Legal Utopia, we use technology and data to help people make better decisions about legal services. We do this by understanding people's legal needs, leveraging market data to match them with the right lawyer and provide unique insights into the legal professions. Established in 2017, Legal Utopia has been backed by its 263 shareholders having successfully raised investment from the global investment platform Republic (previously, Seedrs), whilst also being awarded innovation grants from the UK's innovation agency - Innovate UK - in 2020 and 2023. Legal Utopia has utilised this support to develop novel, patent-pending AI Methods and techniques in the field of NLP machine learning to serve its 300,000 customers since 2020 and 250,000 registered users. Meanwhile, our leadership in the market in the development of Market Indicators for the legal professions of England and Wales sets ourselves out from the competition and market with a pioneering capability to assist our customers in choice when seeking legal help. Our Values We are a hungry and tenacious team. Our pace of work is high and we like to achieve practical outcomes. This transcends our values: Get it done: tenacious and willing to pioneer where others don't Be data curious: stewards of market data and ask the questions that need to be asked Seek clarity: keep it simple so that legal professions are accessible to all Eligibility At this time, we are unable to sponsor a visa. Applicants must have the pre-existing right to work in the UK. A CV demonstrating your eligibility and fit as our ideal candidate is required to be considered in this recruitment process. Sifted candidates shall be contacted for interviews with the Legal Utopia team to assess suitability with the responsibilities and qualifications outlined in this job description. Our ideal candidate Our technology team is seeking a new full-time team member to bring leadership, longevity and high-quality software development to our backend repository and codebase at Legal Utopia. They will be detailed and methodical in their approach to backend software development to deliver precise, accurate and reliable endpoints, apis and alike to our frontend team to enable them to fully realise our Product Owner and Head of Design’s hard work to bring compelling services to our customers. The Lead Backend Developer shall be enthusiastic to input into senior developer and business level support to make improvements to our backend codebase whilst responding to needs as the frontend team deliver more significant architectural codebase changes to streamline our frontend development. The candidate would collaborate and cooperate with the lead frontend developer to establish a symbiotic workplace and development environment with senior input from the Head of IT and experienced contractors. The candidate will provide input and feedback on the code and processes, as well as take leadership in the release process in collaboration with the QA Engineer whilst ultimately taking responsibility for the delivery of medium and long-term backend software development goals within the IT function of the business. Using their expert-level skills and knowledge of Python, Django and DRF, together with a good understanding of Figma and best coding practices, this candidate will be able to translate user and business needs into functional, highly performant, responsive, and replicable backend code. Responsibilities Lead on the backend development, maintenance and management of the backend repository; Lead on all api and endpoint development for delivery to the frontend team, as well as all third-party api integrations across our business systems, content management system, and third-party services; Identify, report, and resolve bugs and regression identified across our Postman portfolio of 1000 endpoints and apis; Collaborate with our frontend team on all releases and deployments; Support the Project Manager with backend ticket refinement ceremonies and exercises to maintain clear, concise, and consistent ticket management; Feedback to the technology team and business to improve workflow, deployment and alike processes for maximum efficiency and ease of work; Assist with the identification, integration, and operation of automations to reduce administration and maximum software development time; Take on and apply hot-fixes and patching as necessary; Review, plan and collaborate with the Head of Design, Head of IT and Product Manager on all things UI/X when preparing to take on new tickets to implement product and service designs; Report daily within stand-up calls to the PM on all process with tickets, as well as management of ticket status to keep the business informed of work progress; and Take company policy seriously and embed it into daily activities and decisions within your role and responsibilities, including following best practices and cyber security precautions. Qualifications Undergraduate degree in software development / computer science or sufficient length of work history employment references 5 years' employment of continuous workplace software development experience Strong knowledge of: Vercel, Github, Jira, Slack, AWS (Route53, Cognito, API Gateway, ECS, RDS, S2, IAM), Postman Very strong proficiency in Python, Django and Django Rest Framework Strong experience in API development, testing, integration and deployment Knowledge of best practices in backend development Awareness in SEO and adoption of approaches in dynamic api content generation Experience in oAuth integrations and management (Apple, Google, LinkedIn) An understanding of Agile development and continuous delivery Knowledge of testing (any test framework) and experience of writing tests Experience of using git, understanding branching, merging, conflict resolving Desirable Certificate, familiarity or experience with AWS (EC2s, ECS, S3s, RDS, Cognito, etc) Experience of teaching/mentoring junior developers Github track record in contributions to repositories (private or open source) Experience with Jira Nice To Have Knowledge, experience or familiarity with frontend tech (HTML, CSS, JS/TS) Some proficiency in frontend languages or frameworks (eg. React, NextJs etc)