Backend Engineer – Platform

• Practice Development & Integration

• Technologies Development Skills

• Location London, United Kingdom

• Type Contract

Backend Engineer - Platform
Purpose of the role
We are looking for a senior-level engineer profile to join and strengthen the Paved Road initiative within TechNL. This is not a classic product-team backend role. The purpose of this role is to help shape, standardize, and continuously improve the engineering ecosystem around backend microservice development so that developers can deliver business value faster, more safely, and with less friction.
The core vision of the Paved Road is to make it possible for a new developer joining a team to be able to deploy a backend service to production in approximately 20 minutes, with all surrounding engineering concerns already properly arranged. This includes not just deployment itself, but also the wider delivery lifecycle: architecture, coding conventions, CI/CD, security, quality, compliance, documentation, and FinOps awareness.
This role is therefore best suited for someone who combines strong backend engineering ability with an enablement mindset: someone who enjoys helping other engineers, improving standards, driving adoption, and taking ownership of cross-team technical topics.

Context of the assignment
The Paved Road is a standardization initiative covering the full lifecycle of backend microservices. It includes, among other things:

• folder structure and project setup
• architecture principles
• programming patterns
• coding conventions and coding style
• linting and quality guardrails
• CI/CD workflows
• DevOps supportability
• security
• testing and validation
• documentation
• compliance
• FinOps considerations

The goal is that engineers building product features should not need to reinvent all of this repeatedly. Instead, the surrounding engineering foundation is prepared for them so they can focus on delivering product value.
The role is part of an engineering enablement setup rather than a traditional feature-delivery team. The candidate will contribute to building and improving the paved road itself and, through that, support many development teams.

What this profile is expected to do
The candidate should be capable of owning and driving technical topics independently from discovery to alignment to implementation support.
Examples discussed in the conversation include topics such as:

• integrating Kafka into the paved road so developers can choose it as part of service generation/provisioning
• helping define how data movement / DDP-related capabilities can be provisioned through the paved road
• contributing to topics like multi-tenancy
• working on backend standardization in a way that enables future modernization and smoother migration paths
• collaborating with adjacent paved road initiatives, including front-end paved road efforts where relevant

The intended user experience is that a developer can go through the paved road flow, select required capabilities such as Kafka or data-related components, press generate, and receive the necessary setup, permissions, and connections for the microservice.
This means the candidate must be able to:

• investigate a topic independently
• align with multiple teams and stakeholders
• propose a sound solution
• document it properly, e.g. in ADR-style form where needed
• help drive organizational agreement
• support implementation and adoption

Required technical profile
Core must-have

• Strong backend engineering background
• Strong experience with Kotlin
• Good understanding of the JVM ecosystem
• Comfortable working in a mixed Kotlin/Java environment
• Able to work on backend microservices and engineering foundations rather than only business features

Strongly preferred

• Understanding of microservice lifecycle engineering
• Experience with architecture principles, coding standards, and engineering best practices
• Experience with DevOps / CI/CD / workflow automation
• Experience with security, quality, testing, and validation in software delivery
• Familiarity with documentation and ADR-style technical decision-making
• Experience with platform-like or enablement-like engineering work

Nice to have

• Full-stack capability is a plus, though not mandatory
• Front-end understanding can be valuable because backend and frontend paved road efforts may collaborate, especially in modernization scenarios
• Experience with topics such as:
  • Kafka
  • multi-tenancy
  • platform engineering
  • modernization/migration programs
  • standardization across teams

DevOps expectations
DevOps is not required at expert level from day one, but the candidate must be willing and able to learn and work with it.
The expectation is not necessarily a pure full-stack or full DevOps engineer, but the candidate should:

• be comfortable using and managing workflows that support CI/CD
• understand operational/support implications
• contribute from a support and maintainability perspective
• grow into broader lifecycle ownership

In short: DevOps depth is beneficial, but mindset and willingness to learn are essential.
 

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