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