Senior Python Backend Engineer - Real-Time Distributed Systems
£550/day Outside IR35
Watford / Hybrid (Initial onsite, then mainly remote)
6-month contract

We’re working with a highly engineering-led technology business building large-scale real-time backend systems within a distributed Azure environment.

This is not a role for architects, managers, or high-level solution designers.

We are specifically looking for deeply hands-on Python backend engineers who are comfortable operating at implementation level within complex distributed systems.

The environment is heavily focused on:

• Real-time event-driven processing
• High-throughput backend services
• Distributed microservice architectures
• Low-latency data ingestion pipelines
• Operational resilience and observability
• Production-scale concurrency and asynchronous processing

You’ll be joining a team working on systems that continuously ingest and process large volumes of operational and telemetry-style data from connected platforms and devices.

Tech environment:

• Python
• FastAPI
• Azure Functions
• Azure Service Bus / Event Hub
• Kubernetes / AKS
• Docker
• Cosmos DB
• Distributed messaging systems
• Event-driven microservices
• Real-time processing pipelines

What they’re looking for:

• Strong hands-on Python engineering experience
• Experience building and debugging production backend systems
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous processing
• Strong practical experience with messaging/event-driven architectures
• Experience handling high-throughput or streaming workloads
• Strong operational mindset around resilience, retries, observability, scaling, and failure handling
• Engineers who still code heavily day-to-day

Highly desirable:

• IoT, telemetry, or time-series style systems
• FastAPI
• Kafka / Service Bus / RabbitMQ / Event Hub
• Kubernetes
• Azure-native backend engineering

This is a fast-moving contract process with a single technical interview stage.