Senior Backend Engineer

About 9fin

The world's largest asset class, debt, operates with the worst data.

Technology has revolutionized equity markets with electronic trading, quant algos and instantaneous news. However, in debt capital markets, the picture is completely different. It still behaves like it’s in the 1980s; trillions of dollars of trades are placed over the phone, news is slow, and corporate credit information is imperfect and scattered.

Our mission is to change this.

9fin's proprietary technology delivers fast and comprehensive financial, credit, legal & ESG analysis. Our clients are able to make faster, more informed decisions, win more business and most importantly, save time.

Our fast growing list of clients include 9 of the top 10 Investment Banks, leading Asset Managers, Hedge Funds and Law Firms.

What you'll work on

• As part of a cross functional team, lead projects by defining and designing systems, building proof of concepts, and delivering new service functionality - including APIs, data processing and automation - while collaborating with Product and Clients

• Development and engineering primarily on the backend services and web application hosted tools and systems of the 9fin platform.

• Play an impactful role within project teams as a senior IC, running code reviews, mentoring other developers, leadership & involvement in early research and experimentation with new technologies providing input for new features and products.

• Continually improve the 9fin codebase taking the chance to automate, refactor and document when it’s most impactful..

• Very diverse web platforms, from complex financial data modelling, complex access control business logic, capturing environmental, emission, energy data, incorporation of ML/AI prediction services, data visualisation serving and automation systems.

• Collaboration and teamwork: Cross functional teams are formed for all projects including the appropriate domain expertise from 9fin financial, legal and editorial colleagues. This allows the best quality information and feedback to go directly to engineering project teams. Your ability to explain and break down complex projects to non technical audiences will enable productive and efficient team progress.

• Developer Experience: Through managed automated preview environments, feature flags and well maintained non production environments. You will be able to move with velocity and get feedback and iterate quickly.

Our Backend Stack

• Python is the dominant backend language used

• Flask & FastAPI

• Typing is used within our Python stack to power automated documentation and API definitions

• Relational Databases (PostgreSQL) at the heart of majority of services

• We have our own internal developer platform with standardised paved road approaches to infrastructure to bring your code into production as quickly as possible.

• We’re AWS for Cloud hosted services

• Heavy use of AWS lambda Serverless

• Docker (AWS ECS) for uniform development/deployment from dev to prod

Requirements

This role will be a great fit if you:

• Have experience operating as a Senior IC Engineer, leading systems design and infrastructure discussions, mentoring more junior team members, and scoping work within cross-functional product teams.

• Plan and reason about software effectively, clearly and compellingly communicating its purpose within systems and its business impact on clients

• Have hands-on experience designing data flow through software, from persistent storage to API endpoints, while applying industry best practices for validation

• Experience with Python and its web frameworks (we currently use FastAPI with strong typing & Pydantic)

• Strong experience delivering APIs, Service Oriented Architecture

• Good working knowledge of SQL statements for retrieving data

• A good collaborator and communicator with cross functional engineering teammates and others within 9fin

Code Quality: Through writing testable, maintainable code, and by engaging in code review for your own work and for reviewing others
Benefits

We’re a scaling start up and we enjoy sharing our success, when the company succeeds, we always reinvest that in our people. We also offer huge amounts of responsibility, an abundance of opportunity for growth and a platform to truly excel.

Financial & Insurance

• Competitive Salary (our salary bands are benchmarked at the top end of the market)

• Equity options

• Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• Paid sick leave with Income Protection for long periods of illness

• Group Life Assurance

• Season Ticket Loan & Cycle to Work schemes

Time off

• 25 holiday days per year

• Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days)

• Hybrid working model, to allow you the flexibility to decide how, where and when you do your best work

• Work abroad for up to 3 months a year

• 1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service

• Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available (22 weeks fully paid for all birthing parents, 12 weeks fully paid for all non-birthing parents)

Training & Culture

• Professional learning and development budget of £1250

• Quarterly team socials

• Summer and Winter company social events

9fin is an equal opportunities employer

At 9fin we are dedicated to building and promoting a fair and inclusive workplace where everyone can reach their full potential and truly belong. We recognize that building diverse teams enables a more creative and productive environment. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be who we’re looking for — either for this role, or perhaps another.