Popsa

Senior Backend Engineer

Popsa  •  London, GB / Soho, GB (Onsite)  •  2 hours ago
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Job Description

The mission for the role

The backend team at Popsa is responsible for the entirety of the backend, from the underlying AWS infrastructure to the microservices and code that runs on it.

As guardians of Popsa’s infrastructure the team are involved in the design and development of features from the get go; supporting with domain knowledge in API design, security and infrastructure; enabling Popsa to bring exciting features from inception to implementation.

The backend team can be considered cross discipline, operating across both the backend services and platform/devops domains — this richness keeps the workload varied and exciting.

We’re looking for a highly skilled and driven Senior Backend Engineer who can cover a wide scope of responsibilities, including user-facing feature development, infrastructure reliability and security, and development of internal services. Sitting at the heart of the company, this role will work directly with product, front-end engineering, data science, customer service and operational teams.

This is a really exciting opportunity with the potential to directly influence the company's growth, through innovative technical design and freedom to explore novel approaches

What we are looking for

  • Strong recent experience with AWS and its managed/serverless ecosystem
  • A problem-solving mindset and a constructive, collaborative approach
  • Clear communicator who works well across engineering and product teams
  • Solid experience developing in Go, familiarity with languages such as Python or TypeScript
  • would be a plus
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes for orchestration
  • Proficient with Terraform for infrastructure configuration and provisioning
  • Practical knowledge of observability tooling (CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus)
  • Comfortable writing SQL for analytical workloads (e.g., Athena)
  • Experience with ElasticSearch/OpenSearch (nice to have)
  • Familiarity with GitHub Actions (nice to have)
  • Interest in and active use of AI-based tooling to support efficient engineering practices
  • A technically strong, product-focused mindset that balances engineering quality with
  • product priorities

Some of our exciting technical challenges

  • Scaling infrastructure globally to provide a low-latency experience to our users
  • Enabling real-time design collaboration between our users
  • Developing social-graphs to help users enrich their stories

Tech Stack highlights


  • Core Platform
  • Cloud-hosted infrastructure running 30+ micro-services on AWS using Kubernetes (EKS) and gRPC for interservice communication
  • Serverless stack with over 250 Lambda functions for event processing
  • Terraform-managed infrastructure
  • DynamoDB application database
  • Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger and Splunk for observability and alerting

  • User-facing Apps:
  • 100% native iOS app built in Swift using the Coordinators (C-MVVM) pattern
  • 100% native Android app built in Kotlin, using JetPack compose
  • (Both mobile apps leverage native vision and machine learning frameworks to perform deep analysis on photos using our in-house trained models)
  • Modern, high-performance Typescript web application deployed on Vercel
  • Fully automated deployment workflows for Web development

  • Data Architecture:
  • S3 data lake with Athena and Apache Spark for analytical workloads
  • AWS Batch for orchestration of user-facing data-rich features like Memory generation
  • Sagemaker for model training and evaluation
  • Bedrock and AgentCore for agents workflows

  • Ops:
  • Linear used for work management across all teams
  • Figma used for product design and front-end prototyping
  • Confluence (moving to Coda) for knowledge management
  • Slack for internal comms
  • Mixpanel and Growthbook for behavioural analytics and multi-variate testing
  • ChatGPT, Claude and AI-enabled IDEs available to all team members
Popsa

About Popsa

Popsa is a B Corp™ certified startup building generative AI technology that automates the creation personalised products for consumers all over the world. The company is developing AI agents that generate designs for artefacts such as photo books, based on the data contained in photos, therefore removing countless anxieties and manual tasks usually associated with personalisation, and empowering everyday people with professional storytelling techniques for the first time.

Its existing award-winning app has made printing memories so easy and accessible that anyone can do it. As a result, the company receives 20,000 orders every week, increasing to 80,000 during Q4.

Popsa's native iOS and Android apps are available in 12 languages – attracting more than 8 million users to date – and they ship to 50 countries around the world. Despite being headquartered in London, only 15% of Popsa’s revenue comes from the UK (France is the company’s top market whilst the US is the fastest growing).

People come to Popsa to create photobooks and other products, but what Popsa really does is help them process their lives and relationships through reflection on their photos.

The company's longer term ambition is to become a global destination for the curation of memories; a space to explore all of life’s moments and the emotions that come with them – not just the highlights. So holidays, but also lazy days and sad days too. Because Popsa believes the more you reflect, the better you understand yourself and your connections with others.

Industry
IT & Software
Company Size
51-200 employees
Headquarters
London, GB
Year Founded
2016
Website
popsa.com
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