Senior Python Backend Engineer - Real-Time Distributed Systems£550/day Outside IR35Watford/Hybrid (Initial onsite, then mainly remote)6-month contractWe're working with a highly engineering-led technology business building large-scale Real Time Back End systems within a distributed Azure environment.
This is not a role for architects, managers, or high-level solution designers.
We are specifically looking for deeply hands-on Python Back End engineers who are comfortable operating at implementation level within complex distributed systems.
The environment is heavily focused on:
- Real-time event-driven processing
- High-throughput Back End services
- Distributed microservice architectures
- Low-latency data ingestion pipelines
- Operational resilience and observability
- Production-scale concurrency and asynchronous processing
You'll be joining a team working on systems that continuously ingest and process large volumes of operational and telemetry-style data from connected platforms and devices.
Tech environment:
- Python
- FastAPI
- Azure Functions
- Azure Service Bus/Event Hub
- Kubernetes/AKS
- Docker
- Cosmos DB
- Distributed messaging systems
- Event-driven microservices
- Real-time processing pipelines
What they're looking for:
- Strong hands-on Python engineering experience
- Experience building and debugging production Back End systems
- Deep understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous processing
- Strong practical experience with messaging/event-driven architectures
- Experience handling high-throughput or streaming workloads
- Strong operational mindset around resilience, retries, observability, scaling, and failure handling
- Engineers who still code heavily day-to-day
Highly desirable:
- IoT, telemetry, or time-series style systems
- FastAPI
- Kafka/Service Bus/RabbitMQ/Event Hub
- Kubernetes
- Azure-native Back End engineering
This is a fast-moving contract process with a single technical interview stage.