Backend Engineer (AI)

Company: nPlan
Apply for the Backend Engineer (AI)
Location: London
Job Description:

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 understand, manage, and reduce the risk in some of the world’s largest impactful construction projects. Join our Product Engineering team to design, implement, and ship high-impact AI solutions that help the world build better.

The role: Backend Engineer

The backend team owns the systems that power our platform. You will design, implement, and build new capabilities that are performant, dependable, and extensible. These capabilities range from basic CRUD and APIs to cutting‑edge Agentic AI systems powered by a wide range of frontier AI models.

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.

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

  • Startup mentality: we are changing the world, and what is required can be ambiguous yet we need to deliver fast and reliably.
  • Experience of production systems: at least 3 years of experience building scalable production systems. Experience using Kubernetes in a cloud environment.
  • Solid system design fundamentals: you know how to design a reliable, testable and scalable system from scratch.
  • Strong SQL: data models, indexing, production‑level migrations, performance scaling.
  • A testing mindset: we always strive to be better at this so would be particularly keen who brings this to the team.
  • Practical security awareness: you understand attack surfaces, common vulnerabilities. Ideal if you have experience of SOC or ISO accredited companies.
  • Using the latest technologies to iterate fast: using coding agents and similar technologies to get stuff done fast.
  • Strong code review habits: This skill is an important quality gate for pushing to production and is becoming even more so with the rise of coding agents.

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.
  • Remember to mention “crane” in your application — we’re looking for people who pay attention to details.

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.

  • 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!

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Posted: May 17th, 2026