zego - Lead Backend Engineer

• Lead several engineers within a team or workstream, guiding their work towards user value and business opportunity • Design, build and own the Python microservices that power our insurance platform: secure, observable and built for scale • Drive architectural discussions and decisions across multiple teams, shaping the future of our backend systems • Deliver large, complex technical initiatives end to end, with clarity on scope, sequencing and impact • Raise the bar on engineering excellence: testability, reliability, scalability and clean code • Coach and mentor engineers, sharing context, feedback and support so the whole team levels up • Improve how the team works, from CI/CD pipelines to incident response, investigating root causes and fixing them pragmatically • Deep backend expertise - Hands-on experience building cloud-native microservices, Python preferred, though strong experience in another language works too! • Systems at scale - You have built distributed architectures and understand performance tuning and observability, on top of solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms and system design • You strive for simplicity - You build systems that are easy to understand, test and maintain, and you weigh trade-offs rather than reaching for complexity • You lead by example - Through mentoring, clear communication and a collaborative mindset, plus the tenacity to find a way forward through ambiguity or tough technical problems • You are proactive with people beyond engineering - You raise concerns early, engage the right people, and explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders • You work AI-first - You will use AI daily here, and we mean daily. You do not need to arrive an expert, but you do need to arrive curious, experiment fast, and take ownership of getting good quickly. People who wait to be trained will find this uncomfortable • THE ZEGO WAYS OF WORKING 🏡 • Teams work better with time to collaborate and space to get things done. We call it Zego Hybrid: some of us are in our office (central London or Halifax) weekly, others monthly or quarterly. It's about finding the balance between face time and focus that produces great work and a healthy life around it. • We also make a point of getting everyone in the same room. Teams come together every quarter, and once a year the whole company does, properly. It's a serious investment and consistently one of the best parts of the year. • Here is what the last one looked like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKOYDx6AMxQ.