Lead Engineer II - Backend (Python)

Best Egg, now part of Barclays, is a market-leading, tech-enabled financial platform helping people build financial confidence through innovative lending solutions and financial health tools. As a Barclays company, we combine the agility and customer focus of a fintech with the global reach, stability, and purpose of a leading financial institution—working together to create a better financial future for our customers and communities.

At Best Egg, you’ll find a culture grounded in our core values—putting people first, creating clarity, delivering with excellence —enhanced by Barclays’ commitment to integrity, inclusion, and long-term impact. Together, we empower our colleagues to challenge, innovate, and take ownership while making a meaningful difference in people’s financial lives.

With the strength of Barclays behind us, we offer expanded opportunities for growth, development, and career mobility across a global organization—while continuing to build the products and experiences that make Best Egg unique.

We’re looking for collaborative, curious problem-solvers who are excited to make an impact and grow with us.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

What You Will Do

• Design, develop, and deliver high-quality backend Python services iteratively and incrementally.
• Take ownership of key services and APIs—from hands-on coding through CI/CD, deployment to AWS, monitoring, and on-call support.
• Contribute to backend observability using tools like Datadog for logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting.
• Participate in technical design discussions and contribute architectural insights, working with senior leaders to shape solutions.
• Ensure software follows modern engineering practices, including clean code, testing, automation, and modern backend architecture patterns.
• Support continuous improvement in code quality, reliability, performance, and developer experience.
• Translate business requirements into clear technical tasks and help validate assumptions and approaches.

Qualifications & Experience

• 3–7 years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Python at scale, including modern Python (3.13+), type hints, async/await, packaging, and a strong grasp of the standard library and the broader ecosystem.
• Expertise with at least one major Python web framework (FastAPI preferred; Django or Flask also strong) and the patterns that make Python services reliable in production.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, including building and operating production workloads on Lambda (serverless functions, event-driven architectures) and EKS (containerized services on Kubernetes).
• Working knowledge of supporting AWS services such as API Gateway, SQS/SNS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and Secrets Manager.
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL
• Experience with Redis for caching, rate limiting
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and Kubernetes fundamentals (deployments, services, scaling, troubleshooting).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern release tooling; familiarity with GitHub Actions and Octopus Deploy is a plus.
• Experience with unit, integration, and contract testing (pytest or similar).
• Experience working within mature, legacy codebases and contributing to incremental modernization efforts.

What Success Looks Like

• Own core services or features.
• Deliver high-quality, production-ready code and contribute meaningfully to team goals.
• Build strong working relationships within Engineering, Product, and partner teams.
• Lead development of one or more services or features with increasing autonomy.
• Help improve service performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Support and elevate engineering practices through mentorship, code reviews, and process improvements.