SC Clearance or eligibility for SC Clearance Essential Backend Focus 3 month contract with scope to extend or go permanent Key Responsibilities Yourresponsibilitieswillinclude, but not limited to: Backend architecture &APIs (primary focus) Design and evolve scalable backend services in Python using FastAPI for high-availability, high-throughput workloads. Build well-versioned RESTful APIs aligned to OpenAPI/Swagger, with strong conventions for consistency, idempotency, and backward compatibility. Implement authentication and authorization using OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained permissions. Design and maintain event-driven architectures and background processing pipelines (e.g. Celery, Redis Streams, Kafka) to enable scalable async workloads, retries, and fault-tolerant integrations. Design data models and optimise relational databases (PostgreSQL) for performance, partitioning, and horizontal scale. Introduce caching, rate limiting, and queuing to meet performance budgets and latency goals. Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and robust error/retry semantics. Frontend contributions Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript as required. Work with product and design to take features end-to-end, from API through to UI. Help maintain a pragmatic frontend stack with a focus on shipping over perfection, without compromising on security. Infrastructure contributions Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds. Contribute to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod. Security and reliability Write secure, well-tested code (unit, integration, end-to-end) and uphold coding standards through code reviews. Contribute to logging, metrics, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for the services you build. Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design. Cross-functional and process Collaborate closely with the engineering team, product and leadership to scope, sequence, and deliver outcomes. Translate product requirements into technical plans, breaking work into milestones with measurable success criteria. Mentor engineers on backend design, API ergonomics. Qualifications,experienceand skills SC Clearance or the ability to obtain SC (and later DV). Proven experience in professional software engineering, with a strong focus on backend development in Python and with event-driven architectures. Proven experience designing and operating production REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger. Comfortable working in a React/TypeScript codebase. Deep understanding of relational database design, indexing, performance tuning, and migrations (PostgreSQL). Proficiency with containerisation (Docker) and Git-based workflows. Familiarity with AWS core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, ALB/ELB, ECR/ECS). Experience with API versioning, security, documentation strategies, and automated testing. Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently with high ownership. Soft skills High-agency engineer who owns outcomes end to end. Pragmatic, research-driven approach with a bias to ship and iterate. Clear communicator who can mentor, influence, and raise the bar for the team. Comfortable defining SLAs, making trade-offs explicit, and operating production systems.