Senior Python Backend Engineer

Build and operate the Python/Django systems that turn inconsistent, changing foodservice information into dependable platform inputs - with deliberate validation, failure recovery, reprocessing and traceability.

This is a senior hands-on backend role, not a generic Django CRUD role and not a warehouse-only Data Engineer role.

The defining capability is production information processing: multi-step workflows that must remain correct and recoverable when data is incomplete, processing fails or the same work is delivered more than once.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Build and improve production Django applications, services and operational backend capabilities.
• Design multi-step ingestion and processing from source through validation, transformation or enrichment to persistence or downstream handoff.
• Make failure behaviour explicit, including invalid data, retries, duplicate processing, partial failure and safe reprocessing.
• Work with asynchronous and scheduled processing and make important workflow state observable.
• Acquire and process information from APIs, files, catalogues, documents, websites and other approved sources where required.
• Diagnose production failures using logs, metrics, database/runtime evidence and controlled reproduction.
• Improve tests, technical documentation and operational guidance for long-term maintainability.

Preferred Candidate Profile

• Strong production Python backend engineering with current hands-on ownership.
• Strong production Django experience beyond simple CRUD/API familiarity.
• A substantial production data or information-processing workflow that you personally built, operated or materially improved.
• Practical reasoning about reliability and correctness: validation, retries, duplicate processing, partial failure, idempotency, replay/reprocessing and monitoring.
• Strong relational database engineering and production debugging capability.
• Clear written technical communication and responsibility beyond initial implementation.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

Useful experience may include PostgreSQL, Celery or comparable workers, Redis/RabbitMQ/Kafka, FastAPI, external data acquisition or crawling, browser automation, and practical AI/LLM integration. These are not an all-tools checklist.

Ideal Candidate Summary

You are a senior Python/Django engineer who still works hands-on and has owned production workflows where information moves through multiple stages and failures have real downstream consequences.

Your experience may be described as ingestion, background jobs, imports, synchronisation, webhooks, reconciliation, ETL, file processing, crawling or data pipelines. What matters is that you can explain the production lifecycle and your personal responsibility for it.