Senior Backend Engineer

Elder•London, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Elder is a dynamic scale-up revolutionising the care industry by connecting older adults to self-employed carers through an innovative technology-driven introductory model. We are committed to using data-driven insights to continuously improve outcomes for our customers and carers. We are actively seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to scale, and optimise the services we offer customers and carers on our platform. If this is a mission that excites you, we'd love to hear from you. The role of the technology team at Elder is to set Elder apart from the rest with meaningful use of technology - our technology platform is the engine that powers the rest of the business. We build web applications that connect families and carers with each other and Elder. We use data, algorithms, and machine learning to find the right carer to look after each of our customers. In 2025, we’ll continue our journey towards becoming the UK’s leading live-in care provider and do even more to deliver a best in class service. We’re currently looking for a talented Kotlin/Java backend engineer with a real passion for cloud infrastructure to join the team as a backend engineer. You’ll be a part of our larger engineering function, working with other backend and frontend developers to build new functionality on the platform that allows Elder to connect families with carers and arrange live-in care at scale across the whole country. Having started on Java and Spring, we have since moved to Kotlin for all new development and are doing things a bit differently with the majority of our microservices following a CQRS architecture with event sourcing. All of our systems are on Kubernetes and using the Google Cloud Platform. This role comes with the opportunity to take ownership of our GCP infrastructure, observability, and platform reliability, with a focus on ensuring our systems remain secure, scalable, and well maintained. We encourage collaboration and our engineers are involved in the full development lifecycle, from brainstorming of what’s possible to seeing how the products are being used by our end users. This is a great opportunity for a backend engineer interested in building reliable and scalable smart platforms that solve real world problems, and to do more than simply working off fully formed ideas in Linear.

Requirements

Strong communication and collaboration skills, comfortable working on their own and directly with both technical and non technical stakeholders
Experience working on backend platforms following modern architectures such as microservices or serverless, including deploying to production
Strong fundamentals of Java or Kotlin development practices
A good grasp of principles behind building reliable and scalable systems, including redundancy, time complexity, and memory management
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and container orchestration, ideally with Kubernetes on GCP, and a strong understanding of platform reliability, cost awareness, and secure configuration
Solid understanding of security best practices across infrastructure and applications, including secrets management and credential rotation. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code or automation tools is a plus
Experience with observability tools (such as Prometheus and Grafana), service monitoring, and debugging in production environments
A demonstrated interest in staying up-to-date with new technology, new frameworks, new languages and other developments like AI.
A passion for working collaboratively to solve meaningful real-world problems with technology, not just writing code!

Nice To Haves

Having worked with CQRS/event sourcing in the past is a bonus, but not a requirement - but you’re likely already in favour of functional style programming patterns

Responsibilities

Working directly with product managers, frontend engineers, and collaborate with the wider business to shape technology-powered product solutions
Close collaboration within the backend engineering team, in code reviews, pair programming, knowledge sharing sessions and other activities to maintain best practices and consistency across the platform
Implementing, testing, and releasing new functionality across Elder’s backend systems with focus on the algorithms that match our customers with carers, and system integrations
Collaborating with frontend engineers in building new APIs and data contracts to support new functionality
Maintaining and evolving our cloud infrastructure (GCP, Kubernetes) to ensure high availability, security, and performance
Managing service observability and reliability, including logging, metrics and alerting (we use Prometheus and Grafana)
Handling database and service upgrades (e.g. MySQL, Kubernetes), secrets management and security best practices
Taking ownership of platform-level concerns such as deployment pipelines, configuration management, and cost awareness
Helping drive pragmatic AI utilisation across our development lifecycle. If you’re excited about the prospect of Claude Code, OAI Codex, Google Jules and other AI coding agents this is a definite plus.

Benefits

Competitive Salary + Company Bonus
25 days holiday + bank holidays + 1 extra day holiday for every year worked up to 5 years
Dental and health insurance
Hybrid office (1 day in the office, Wednesday)
Learning & home office budget
Sponsored quarterly team and company socials
Mentoring and coaching programmes to help you achieve your personal and career goals
Macbook + any particular extras you require
Cycle-to-work scheme
AND a genuine opportunity to be a very key part of a high-growth business