Fully remote, UK-based
£400 – £500 per day (Outside IR35)
3–6 Month Contract
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.
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.
Our stack
* 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