About Whitespace
Founded in 2016, Whitespace is a team of engineers, researchers, and designers based in Belfast. We lead the creation of smarter, safer AI solutions for regulated industries. As AI presents transformative opportunities, many organisations struggle to harness its full potential. Whitespace helps bridge that gap. Our clients include UK defence and private sector companies, trusting us to deliver responsible, cutting-edge AI tailored to complex challenges.
Role Summary
We're seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to join our team and make meaningful contributions to technical leadership in a product-focused engineering team. You will be hands-on, working closely day-to-day on a live, customer-serving platform shipping new functionality, improving ongoing capabilities, and enabling greenfield exploration as we evolve our products.
This is a role for someone with deep backend engineering experience in Node.js or Python, who thrives in a fast-paced environment and enjoys solving complex problems at scale. You’ll guide best practices, shape technical decisions, and ensure the robustness and scalability of our backend systems, while mentoring others through example and collaboration.
Duties & Responsibilities
Core Engineering:
- Design, build, and maintain high-quality backend services and APIs in a production environment.
- Contribute to the scalability, performance, and reliability of the platform through refactoring and architecture decisions.
- Work hands-on across the stack with a strong focus on backend technologies in Node.js or Python.
Technical Leadership:
- Set and uphold engineering standards in code quality, testing, deployment, and operations.
- Make informed technical decisions and effectively communicate trade-offs to the team.
- Drive technical discussions, reviews, and planning sessions, ensuring engineering and product stakeholders are aligned.
Product Delivery:
- Work in close collaboration with the delivery lead, head of engineering and engineers to scope and deliver product features end-to-end.
- Contribute to greenfield development work, driving new product projects and technical building blocks.
- Balance product velocity and long-term technical investment, actively looking for areas of improvement.
Mentoring & Collaboration:
- Mentor and help other engineers, sharing knowledge and promoting technical excellence.
- Work with customer-facing teams to resolve issues, identify real usage in the field, and inform product development.
- Push for simple, user-focused solutions without over-engineering.
Technical Expertise:
- Deep technical expertise in backend development, software architecture, and large-scale system design.
- Significant experience with Node.js and/or Python, including frameworks and tooling.
- Experience in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps practices.
- Comfortable working with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and in-memory data stores (e.g., Redis).
- Familiar with message queue systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
- Strong grasp of API design patterns, including REST; experience with GraphQL is a plus.
Technical Leadership:
- Set and uphold engineering standards in code quality, testing, deployment, and operations.
- Make informed technical decisions and effectively communicate trade-offs to the team.
- Drive technical discussions, reviews, and planning sessions, ensuring engineering and product stakeholders are aligned.
Work Experience:
- 8+ years of professional experience in backend software engineering, with a strong track record of delivering commercial systems.
- Deep expertise in Node.js and/or Python, including hands-on experience with at least one major web framework (e.g., Express, Hono, FastAPI, etc.).
- Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable backend systems in cloud-based environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Strong understanding of RESTful API design, asynchronous programming, and event-driven architectures.
- Experience working on both mature codebases and 0 to 1 greenfield projects.
- Hands-on experience with DevOps practices and tools, including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience working in cross-functional teams and collaborating with delivery leads, and frontend developers.
Skills and Abilities
- Technical Problem Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills, capable of navigating technical ambiguity and resolving complex challenges quickly and pragmatically.
- Architectural Thinking: Ability to think in systems, make high-impact architectural decisions, and articulate trade-offs.
- Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, able to collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Mentorship & Leadership: A natural mentor who enjoys helping others grow and fosters a culture of knowledge-sharing and engineering excellence.
- Product-Focused Mindset: Passion for building robust, maintainable, and user-centric products, always balancing technical quality with delivery speed.
- Adaptability: Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment, quickly adjusting to new information or priorities.
- Initiative: Proactive in identifying areas for improvement and driving them forward, both in codebases and in team processes.
- AI/ML Awareness (Desirable): Familiarity with AI/ML concepts, especially generative AI, and interest in working on AI-powered platforms.
