About Esenda
Esenda powers over £1.5bn of inbound and outbound payments annually, in the education space - from tuition and catering fees to supplier payments and payroll.
We’re a revenue-generating startup with strong product-market fit, and we’re growing fast.
Join us now and you’ll work on impactful features that directly shape our platform and make a real difference to our customers.
What you’ll do
- Design, build, and ship reliable backend services and APIs in Python (Flask) that power core product functionality.
- Own features end-to-end: data modelling (Postgres), API design, testing, production rollout and ongoing improvements.
- Help uphold strong engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, testing discipline, clean architecture, and pragmatic decision-making.
- Improve service reliability and operability: monitoring, alerting, logging, runbooks, and reducing on-call toil over time.
- Work closely with the technical team to scope product ideas, focused on delivering customer-facing outcomes (not just “tickets”).
- Contribute to delivery practices: CI/CD improvements, incremental shipping, and maintaining a high-quality codebase.
- You’ll join an on-call rotation (1 week in 4) compensation: paid as an extra £300 per on-call week.
What we’re looking for
- 5+ years experience building and operating production backend systems.
- Strong experience with Python, and hands-on use of Flask (or similar frameworks).
- Solid understanding of Postgres (schemas, migrations, query performance, transactions).
- Experience designing and maintaining APIs (REST; event-driven experience is a plus).
- Comfortable shipping in cloud environments—ideally AWS—and working with modern CI/CD pipelines.
- A strong quality mindset: you care about maintainability, security, reliability, and clear documentation.
Bonus points for
- Payments/fintech knowledge (reconciliation, idempotency, auditability, ledger concepts).
- Experience with distributed systems patterns (queues, background jobs, retries, rate limiting).
- Security experience (threat modelling, OWASP-style concerns, secure API design).
- Familiarity with Terraform.
Why join us?
- £60k salary + equity
- 40 days holiday (incl. bank holidays)
- Pension scheme (3% employer contribution)
- Fully remote, UK-based, with 3 in-person meetups per year
- A transparent, collaborative, and supportive culture
Our stack (today)
- Backend: Python, Flask
- Data: Postgres
- Cloud: AWS
- Edge: Cloudflare
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
- Delivery: CI/CD, automated testing, observability tooling
How we work
- Pragmatic, high-ownership teams with a bias to shipping
- Clear communication, strong collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Code reviews and sensible standards that keep quality high without slowing delivery
Interview process
- 30-min intro call (role fit, values, ways of working)
- Practical exercise (small take-home or pairing session)
- Technical interview (backend fundamentals, API design, production thinking)
- Team chat + Q&A