Staff Backend Engineer

In 2026 our ambition is to be a high-performing, delivery-focused organisation and the best engineering organisation for those who value meaningful career growth.

Responsibilities

• Operate across team boundaries rather than being anchored to one squad, going wherever the highest-impact cross-cutting problem is.
• Connect the dots between teams working in adjacent parts of the system, surfacing dependencies, duplicated effort, or architectural drift before they become expensive.
• Partner directly with the senior leadership as a trusted technical thought partner, helping shape strategy, then translating it into concrete cross-team technical plans.
• Lead cross-functional projects that touch multiple squads, product managers, and stakeholders, driving them to delivery even when no single team owns the outcome.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and architectural judgment wherever it's needed most, including writing code yourself when that's the fastest way to unblock a team.
• Champion engineering excellence and consistent technical standards across teams that may otherwise diverge.
• Mentor and coach engineers across multiple squads, raising the technical bar broadly rather than within a single team.
• Identify complex, cross-team technical challenges and bottlenecks, and drive them to resolution.

Qualifications

• You'll be an excellent fit if you have:
• Experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role, operating across backend systems at scale. Deep payments or shipping domain expertise going in is not required, but you should be genuinely motivated to build it by working across both.
• A track record of working across team boundaries: connecting people, unblocking cross-team initiatives, and driving alignment without formal authority.
• Deep expertise designing, building, and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale, in any domain
• Strong Familiarity with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka) and the tradeoffs of distributed systems at scale.
• Strong judgment on when to go deep versus when to zoom out: you can flex between hands-on delivery and strategic influence.
• Excellent communication skills; you can explain technical tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical leaders with equal clarity, and build consensus across teams that don't naturally agree.
• A genuine curiosity about systems outside your own — you actively seek out how the pieces fit together rather than staying in your lane.
• 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!