Lead Backend Engineer

As Lead Backend Engineer at Zego, you will shape a climate-friendly, scalable insurance platform by guiding a team of engineers and owning Python microservices. You’ll influence backend architecture, champion reliability and observability, and collaborate cross-functionally to accelerate value for drivers. You’ll drive large technical initiatives and mentor others while exploring AI-enabled improvements. This role offers hands-on leadership in a fast-growing, hybrid-work environment with a mission to deliver the lowest priced insurance for good drivers.

• market-competitive salary
• private medical insurance
• company share options
• generous holiday allowance
• wellbeing benefits
• annual flexible hybrid working contribution

• Lead multiple engineers within a team or workstream to deliver user and business value
• Design, build and own Python microservices powering the insurance platform with security, observability, and scale in mind
• Shape backend architecture through cross-team discussions and decisions
• Promote engineering excellence: testing, reliability, scalability, and clean code
• Collaborate with product managers, designers and data analysts to rapidly deliver value
• Coordinate large, complex technical initiatives with clarity and impact
• Mentor engineers with feedback and context to raise the bar
• Identify root causes of problems and implement pragmatic, autonomous fixes
• Improve team workflows, CI/CD pipelines, incident response, and related processes
• Stay curious about AI to enhance productivity and insight

• Backend engineer with hands-on experience building cloud-native microservices (Python preferred)
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design
• Experience building systems at scale with distributed architectures, performance tuning, and observability
• Leadership by example: mentoring, clear communication, collaborative mindset
• Calm, pragmatic approach to solving ambiguous technical challenges and balancing speed with simplicity
• Proactive, initiative-taking mindset with stakeholder engagement beyond engineering
• Ability to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
• Judgement to choose appropriate approaches to problems
• Interest in shaping a product impacting thousands of drivers daily
• Curiosity about applying AI tools to improve productivity and workflows

• mentoring
• clear communication
• collaboration
• Python
• microservices
• cloud-native architectures