Senior Back-end Software Engineer

At ZOE, we use advanced science and technology to transform health—and our Engineering team sits at the heart of that mission. We are a distributed team of around 40 engineers across the UK and EU who thrive on solving complex challenges together.

We are a highly cross-functional group, bringing together front-end, back-end, mobile, machine learning, and data expertise. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Science to build truly impactful member experiences.

We value curiosity, openness, and empowerment. We encourage continuous learning, sharing ideas, and shaping how we work—whether through experimenting with new technology or improving team efficiency.

We're proud of our team's diversity (40% female, 60% male) and believe that varied backgrounds, cultures, and lived experiences make us stronger, more creative, and better equipped to serve our global community.

As a Senior Back-end Engineer, you’ll be a key Individual Contributor within a dynamic, distributed team of software engineers. Your role is about building high quality customer-centric features, technical excellence and deep-dive problem-solving to help shape the future of our product.

You will collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, and Marketing experts. Your focus will be on building and refining robust systems in critical areas such as data collection, account management, and permission logic with involvement in subscription management, pricing experiments, and payment provider integrations, where correctness and scalability are essential. By delivering elegant, scalable solutions to complex problems, you’ll play a vital part in advancing our mission to improve the health of millions.

• Collaborate & Deliver: Work with cross-functional partners to build and ship meaningful features that resonate with our members.

• Experiment at Pace: Design and run experiments to quickly validate ideas, using real-world feedback to refine our approach.

• Tackle Complexity: Take ownership of ambiguous technical problems, breaking them down into manageable parts to ensure we deliver value incrementally and quickly.

• Balance Speed & Quality: Prioritise solutions that provide immediate impact while ensuring the long-term scalability and health of our codebase.

• Build for the Future: Create maintainable, extensible, and testable systems that embody engineering best practices.

• Peer Support: Engage in thoughtful code reviews and mentor fellow engineers, helping to raise the technical bar across the team.

• Create Seamless Experiences: Solve backend challenges in tandem with UX designers to ensure a world-class experience for our members.

• Ship Regularly: Write high-quality code across our microservices and data pipelines, aiming for daily releases to production.

• Backend: Kotlin / Spring Boot, Python / FastAPI & Django

• Frontend: TypeScript, React Native, Next.js

• Data & Messaging: dbt, BigQuery, Airflow, Google Pub/Sub

• Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform

• Tools & CI/CD: Grafana, Firebase Auth, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions

• Have 5+ years of hands-on back-end development experience, with a proven track record of delivering complex features and improving system architecture.

• Possess a pragmatic mindset, championing simple and elegant code over unnecessary complexity, and knowing exactly when a design needs to evolve.

• Hold high standards for technical quality and developer experience, helping the team move fast without compromising on excellence.

• Are adaptable in fast-paced environments, comfortable navigating shifts in priority and driving progress under changing conditions.

• Feel confident working with ambiguity, building iteratively and using feedback loops to reach the best outcomes.

• Are positive and collaborative, bringing energy and a sense of shared purpose to the team.

We know that "hiring processes" can sometimes feel like a black box. At ZOE, we aim for a process that is efficient, insightful, and enjoyable. It’s a two-way street: we want to get to know the real you, and we want you to get a true feel for life at ZOE.

1. The "Meet & Greet" with Talent (45 min) First up, a deep-dive chat with one of our Talent partners. Think of this as a "look under the hood"—we’ll explore your journey so far, what gets you excited about our mission, and make sure we’re aligned on the essentials like compensation, logistics, and right-to-work.

2. The Hiring Manager "Jam Session" (45 min) Next, you’ll meet an Engineering Manager. This isn't just a tick-box exercise; it’s an intentional session where we talk shop. We’ll dive into your technical approach and behavioural experience to see how you’ll thrive in our team, while giving you a front-row seat to our engineering culture and vision.

3. The Remote Loop (The Final Stretch) We’ve grouped our final interviews into a "loop" (usually over Google Meet) to give us a 360-degree view of your brilliance. It consists of three distinct sessions:

• Live Coding (60 min): Let’s build something! We’ll collaborate on a problem to see how you think, code, and iterate in real-time.

• System Design (60 min): The "big picture" talk. We’ll chat about how you architect scalable systems and navigate those tricky technical trade-offs.

• Leadership & Values (60 min): Beyond the code. We want to hear about your collaborative style, how you lift others up, and what ZOE’s mission means to you.

1. The "Becoming a ZOEntist" Moment If we’re a match, we won’t leave you hanging. We’ll reach out quickly to discuss an offer and start planning how we can welcome you to the team.

The experience, skills, and attributes we’ve outlined are what we believe will help someone truly thrive in this role.

However, we understand that talent comes in many forms. If you are genuinely excited about ZOE's mission and this opportunity, please don't hesitate to apply—even if you don't meet every single requirement listed.

We fundamentally value potential and commitment above all else. We are dedicated to fostering growth and providing opportunities for you to learn and develop alongside us.