Lead Backend Engineer

Salary: £40,000 - 60,000 per year

Requirements:

• Deep backend expertise, with hands-on experience building cloud-native microservices; Python preferred, though strong experience in another language also works
• Experience building distributed architectures and understanding performance tuning and observability, alongside solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms and system design
• A focus on simplicity, building systems that are easy to understand, test and maintain, and weighing trade-offs rather than reaching for complexity
• Leadership through mentoring, clear communication and a collaborative mindset, with tenacity to find a way forward through ambiguity or tough technical problems
• Proactive communication with people beyond engineering, raising concerns early, engaging the right people and explaining technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
• An AI-first mindset, using AI daily, staying curious, experimenting fast and taking ownership of learning quickly

Responsibilities:

• 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, ensuring they are 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, including 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, by investigating root causes and fixing them pragmatically

Technologies:

• AI
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Claude Code
• Cloud
• Figma
• Support
• Python
• Snowflake
• Zapier
• microservices
• Data Warehouse
• Marketing

More:

We are Zego, an insurance company leading the AI evolution in insurance. We move fast with a modern tech stack including Claude Code, Snowflake, Figma and Zapier, and we give our teams full ownership to do impactful work. We operate with Zego Hybrid, with some team members in our central London office weekly and others monthly or quarterly, and we bring everyone together as a company every quarter and once a year. We offer a market-competitive salary reviewed annually, an annual performance bonus, share options, private medical insurance for you and your family, pension, generous holiday, £1,000 a year to spend on getting to the office or learning something new, and cutting-edge systems and tools. We are an inclusive employer across the UK and Europe and value diversity in our company.

last updated 37 week of 2026