Backend Engineer - CX

When something goes wrong after a sale, the CX squad makes sure it gets fixed fast, visibly and fairly, so a bad first transaction becomes a reason to come back rather than a reason to leave.

We own the systems behind what happens after checkout:

Disputes and the in-app Dispute Resolution Centre, including self-serve returns and refunds

Auto-cancellation and the protections that tell buyers and sellers when an order is covered and resolved

AI-driven support automation and the APIs and integrations that power it

Internal ops tooling and integrations with our customer support platforms

Our data suggests that problems resolved in-product retain users better than anything that goes through a human agent, so our job is to automate the repeatable cases and leave the hard calls to people.

What you’ll be doing

Build and evolve the backend services and APIs behind disputes, returns, auto-cancellation and support automation, from design through to production

Build and test the integrations that let our AI support look up and act on orders, refunds and shipping

Work with CX Operations to decide where automation should act on its own and when it should hand off to a person

Design solutions ahead of delivery for small-to-medium problems, and contribute to the design of larger pieces of work in the team

Own the health of the services you work on: monitoring, alerting, on-call, fixing what breaks and paying down tech debt

Work in an experiment-led squad: define hypotheses and success metrics, run A/B tests and ship behind feature flags

Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science and CX Operations, and with partner teams such as Payments and Shipping when work crosses boundaries

Take part in code reviews, retros and post-incident reviews, and help teammates get unblocked

Why this role is exciting

Your work directly affects whether a user who had a bad experience stays on Depop

You’ll help shape AI-driven support in a fast-moving area with plenty of room to try new things

You’ll join a small team where engineers get real ownership and stay close to the user impact

What we’re looking for

Core requirements

Solid backend engineering fundamentals and experience delivering production services, mostly on your own

Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Scala, Java, Kotlin or Python, and willingness to pick up others (most of our services are Scala)

Experience building secure, reliable APIs used by external systems, including authentication, error handling and safe retries

Experience with relational databases and data modelling

Understanding of event-driven or asynchronous systems (queues, scheduled jobs, workflows)

Good testing habits at unit and integration level

Experience with CI/CD and production monitoring, and taking part in on-call

How you work

You’ll often own problems end to end, in an area where AI tools keep changing, so you’re comfortable setting your own direction and working things out.

You measure your work by whether it resolves customer issues, using data to check what’s working and what isn’t

You explain technical trade-offs in plain terms, share context openly and ask questions when things are unclear

Helpful experience, but we value learning just as much

Customer support platforms such as Zendesk, including their apps, APIs or workflows

AI support agents or chatbots: configuring their workflows, or connecting them to backend systems through APIs, tools or function calling

Payments, orders, refunds or shipping domains

Marketplace or e-commerce experience

Running experiments and feature flags with tools such as Optimizely

Kafka or other message brokers, workflow engines, Docker and Kubernetes, AWS and infrastructure-as-code

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa

Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space

Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative

Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support

Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days

Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering

Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.

Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options role-dependent

All offices are dog-friendly

Family Life:

For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees

For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees

IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews

Learning budget

Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)

Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.

Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!