Backend Engineer

Salary: £75-90k

Location: UK Remote, with minimal office travel required (1-2x per month)

Ready to reshape one of the world’s largest industries?

nPlan has built a unique AI platform that helps some of the largest construction companies better understand their projects, avoid delay risks, and improve the cost and delivery time of some of the most important infrastructure projects.

The role:

You will work in a collaborative backend engineering team that owns the systems that power our platform. You will design, implement and build new capabilities that are performant, dependable, and extensible.

What you’ll do:

Spin your skills on the backend:

• Design, build and deploy new backend capabilities: our customers are always asking for more, and especially more sophisticated AI systems. Help us stay on the cutting edge.

• Lead technical delivery: propose designs, evaluate trade-offs, drive changes from design to deployment. Don’t be afraid to point out where we can and should be better.

• Improve operations: observability, incident response, performance, scaling, automation. We hate finding and dealing with bugs. You should too.

• Please mention the word ‘crane’ in your application

Our stack

We hire people who are generally language and stack-agnostic. We just ask that you are highly motivated to learn

• Languages: Python, Go, Typescript

• APIs: GQL, gRPC, REST

• Databases: Postgresql, Vector DBs, BigQuery, blob storage

• Async: Vertex AI, GCP pub/sub

• Deployment: GCP, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Github Actions

• Operations: Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry

What we’re looking for

• We're building software that changes how the world plans and delivers infrastructure at scale. The problems are hard, the stakes are real, and the path isn't always clear - you're energised by that, not slowed down by it.

• Three-plus years of owning scalable, real-world systems. You know what breaks at 3am and why, and you've built things that don't. Kubernetes in a cloud environment is part of your toolkit we use at nPlan.

• You can take a blank page and design something reliable, testable, and scalable - not because you followed a framework, but because you understand the trade-offs well enough to make the right calls for the problem in front of you.

• Data modelling, indexing strategy, production-level migrations that don't wake anyone up - you treat the database as a first-class concern. You know what a slow query costs and you don't leave them lying around.

• You don't just write tests because you're supposed to. You write them because you've seen what happens when you don't. You'd raise the bar here, not just meet it.

• You understand attack surfaces and common vulnerabilities. If you've worked inside a SOC- or ISO-accredited company, that's a genuine plus - we take this seriously and you would too.

• Coding agents, LLMs, whatever gets the job done well and quickly is how we work - you've integrated these into how you work and you're thoughtful about where they help and where they need a human in the loop - that's brilliant, tell us more!

• You know a good review isn't about nit-picking style - it's a quality gate. With coding agents producing more code faster, this skill matters more than ever, and you treat it that way.

You might be our person if you…

• Build reliable backend systems: You’ve designed, shipped, and operated production services and APIs that real users depend on.

• Think in distributed systems: You’re comfortable with queues, retries, idempotency, consistency trade-offs, and failure modes.

• Care about operability: You set a high bar for observability (logs/metrics/traces), on-call readiness, incident response, and performance tuning.

• Model and work with data: You write strong SQL and understand indexing, migrations, data modelling, and referential integrity.

• Code with confidence: You build clean, well-tested services (unit/integration tests) and can work effectively in a modern backend stack (e.g., Python, Go, Typescript).

• Thrive in autonomy: You enjoy taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, and driving work to a shippable solution.

What working at nPlan will be like

We are still a relatively small team, so there is plenty of opportunity for a high degree of ownership and growth over different areas of the product, and you will be directly exposed to all areas of the business.

• Remote working, with minimal requirements to come to the Shoreditch office 1-2 times per month, and attend quarterly company get-togethers

• Your voice will always be heard. What you do or say counts, not who you are or where you're from. We are a cross-disciplinary team, and come from all backgrounds and cultures.

• We have three core values that underlie everything we do:

  • Learn from Everything

  • Be Radically Truthful

  • Aim High, Run Fast.

  • These enable us to create a collaborative, inclusive environment where we can move effectively and efficiently to implement the best solutions.

• Fantastic benefits package for Health & Wellbeing, Learning & Development, family leave, and more.

• Having time to yourself and a private life is important. We offer a very flexible work environment and a generous holiday policy.

We are working hard to create a workplace that is inclusive to everyone, no matter their background, or where they are in life. We believe that only a truly diverse place can create great products that serve a wide audience and improve the world.

We believe in equality of opportunities and that's why we make sure that these ideas are reflected in our values, and that we really apply these in all aspects of our company culture.

If you have a need for any adjustments during our interview process, let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Hiring process

• Intro call (Recruiter) (15min)

• Skill Set interview (Engineering Manager) (15-30min)

• Practical exercise (Engineering Manager & Backend Engineer) (60 min)

• Values Alignment call (60min)

• On-site (half a day, can be remote)

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!