[Hiring] Back-End Engineer @The Behavioural Insights Team

Role Description

We are looking for a Back-End Engineer to join the Product team at BIT. In this role, you will work alongside our Group Product Lead and Full-Stack Developer to maintain and develop BIT’s flagship online research platform, Predictiv, while helping the organisation leverage technology to support its impactful client work.

This is a varied backend role that balances traditional web application development with hands-on data engineering. We use Ruby on Rails for web app development, with AWS cloud infrastructure and modern CI/CD tooling; Python-based data engineering (including tools like FastAPI and Streamlit).

You will spend most of your time building robust features for Predictiv, alongside managing our data warehouse and pipelines. Alongside working on Predictiv, we expect this role will have opportunities to support on certain client projects - recent examples include analysing large-scale text datasets and building data pipelines to support automated client data sharing. Overall we are a small team in a fast paced environment, so the successful candidate will be adaptable and delivery focussed.

• Maintains and develops Predictiv, BIT's flagship online research platform, including how data flows through the platform; platform performance at scale; integrations with third party services, including via APIs.
• Embeds security considerations into platform and infrastructure design.
• Establishes and maintains automated testing to support reliable delivery.
• Resolves technical support tickets — diagnosing bugs, answering codebase questions, and scoping new features.
• Helps prioritise and deliver against the Predictiv product roadmap.
• Maintains BIT's Python-based data engineering infrastructure, including a data warehouse and pipelines.
• Supports technical delivery on client projects, such as large-scale data analysis and automated reporting pipelines.
• Advises project teams on technical feasibility and approach when scoping bids.
• Contributes to the team's growing practice in applying AI to existing workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience building and releasing digital products or features, working in small teams or independently, using multiple languages and frameworks.
• Track record of backend work within full-stack frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django.
• Comfort with core web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Ability to identify, locate and fix faults, and manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets.
• Understanding of information security, with the ability to design solutions and services with security controls embedded.
• Experience designing and delivering the simplest working solution, keeping architecture and technology choices proportionate to the maturity of the product and brief.
• Ability to integrate different technologies, balancing tried-and-tested with cutting-edge approaches.
• Familiarity with version control tools such as Git/GitHub.
• Uses AI development tools effectively, with the judgement to review, test and correct AI-generated code.

Requirements

• Experience with SQL and Python-based data pipeline/orchestration tools, ideally including hands-on experience with a modern orchestration framework.
• Comfort building Python-based tools or services (e.g. with FastAPI, Streamlit) to support internal or client-facing data products.
• Experience presenting technical concepts and collaborating effectively to deliver valuable software products in a non-technical environment.
• Understanding of DevOps concepts such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, or MLOps.

Benefits

• Bonus scheme.
• Generous pension scheme with 7% employer contribution.
• A flexible benefit pot of £1,100 to spend on our flexible benefits programme.
• 25 days of annual leave (in addition to public holidays) for full-time employees, rising to 27 days after 2 years continuous service.
• Enhanced parental leave payments.
• Encouragement of flexible working with a culture that enables this.
• Regular team lunches with inspirational guest speakers.
• A variety of interest groups including Film Club, BIT Kids for our parents & 5-a-side team.
• A great office with a fabulous roof terrace overlooking the Thames river, an amazing coffee machine, and fridges stocked full of soft drinks!