Senior Backend Engineer

We are Oritain, a global forensic and data science company on a mission to bring transparency to the world’s supply chains.

Using a combination of advanced chemistry, data science and engineering, Oritain can verify the true origin of raw materials like cotton and coffee. This helps organisations tackle issues like deforestation, forced labour, fraud, and environmental risk across complex global supply chains. It’s genuine tech for good with measurable real-world impact.

You will have a real opportunity to work on technology that directly contributes to better environmental and human outcomes at a global scale. Following $57M in series C investment, the company is continuing to expand internationally and grow across multiple teams.

About the Role

The Senior Backend Engineer plays a key role in designing and building greenfield customer-facing applications and APIs that sit at the heart of our product offering.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Development

• Design, build and maintain scalable backend services and RESTful/GraphQL APIs using Python (Django or FastAPI).
• Write clean, well-tested, production-grade code with a focus on reliability and performance.
• Design and implement data models, working with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and cloud-native data services.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated testing, linting and deployment as standard.

Platform & Infrastructure

• Work within a cloud-native environment on Microsoft Azure, contributing to infrastructure decisions and service architecture.
• Contribute to observability, monitoring and alerting for production services.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis when issues arise.

Collaboration & Ownership

• Take ownership of features end-to-end, from technical design through to delivery and iteration.
• Participate actively in code reviews, architectural discussions, and sprint ceremonies.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Significant professional experience (typically 5+ years) in software engineering, with a strong track record of delivering production systems.
• Backend proficiency in Python (Django or FastAPI), with the ability to design and build APIs and services from scratch.
• Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design, query optimisation and migrations.
• Experience with cloud platforms, ideally Microsoft Azure, and familiarity with containerisation (Docker) and CI/CD practices.
• A pragmatic, product-minded approach to engineering – you care about what you are building, not just how.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative, cross-functional team.
• Experience working with AI-assisted development tools and an interest in integrating AI capabilities into products.

Desirable

• Experience with data engineering concepts: ETL/ELT pipelines, data modelling, or working with data platforms (e.g. Databricks, Azure Data Factory).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues (e.g. Kafka, Azure Service Bus) or streaming data.
• Experience working with scientific, geospatial or time-series data.
• Exposure to infrastructure as code (Terraform) or platform engineering practices.
• Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment.

Company Benefits

• Paid Leave- 35 days (inclusive of public holidays)
• Birthday Off
• Volunteering Leave Allowance
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Life Insurance
• Healthcare Cash Plan
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Pension
• Monthly Wellbeing Allowance
• Breakfast, Snacks, Friday lunch & Barista Coffee Machine in the office
• Learning Portal with over 100,000 assets available to support professional development
• Hybrid working set-up (Minimum 3+ days, Farringdon- London)