Backend Engineer - Phone Scam Disruption

About the team 

We’re searching for a Backend Engineer to join our growing engineering team. Based in either London, Manchester, or Bath, you’ll report to one of our Engineering Managers and work primarily on the backend of our broad range of cybercrime detection and disruption services. The service you’ll spend most of your time on is our phone scam disruption product. 

Criminals impersonate trusted brands like banks, retailers and delivery firms over calls and texts to defraud their customers. Our product finds the phone numbers behind these scams and gets them disabled at source. We report them to the mobile carriers and toll-free providers we work with directly.

The department you'll be joining is Specialised Disruption, where you'll often work on the newer and more novel parts of our platform, but you'll also pick up work across the department's other products, especially as new ones emerge and existing ones evolve. The department is fast-moving and involves working on products that might not have found perfect product-market fit yet. 

About the role 

This role is a mix of maintenance and feature work. You’ll design and build new features and services as the product grows, and take ownership of the systems already in production, caring as much about their reliability, performance, and stability as about what you ship next.  

The phone scam product is primarily Go, alongside some legacy Perl systems that you’ll help maintain and gradually modernise, and an internal TypeScript UI. It would suit an engineer who’s happy working across that whole span, with the main focus on the backend. 

You’ll sometimes help the commercial team work out where a product fits, weighing up which customers it suits and what’s realistic to build. That can mean jumping into a proof of concept yourself, making sure the product works well and improving it where it falls short. 

Day to day, you’ll be   

• Designing and building features and improvements to our products, while taking non-functional requirements like performance, reliability, and security into account.  
• Maintaining and modernising existing services, including some legacy Perl, ensuring stability, maintainability, and operational reliability. 
• Testing and documenting your work to a high standard with strong attention to detail.  
• Taking responsibility for system maintenance, operational stability, and incident prevention.  
• Responding to issues with a sense of urgency and ownership, identifying root causes and implementing long-term fixes.  
• Identifying scaling bottlenecks and resolving them, while being conscious of running costs.  
• Collaborating with other engineering teams to ensure services you own are well-integrated with their services.  
• Working with cross-functional stakeholders to help propose, design and implement solutions to meet business needs.  
• Working independently and proactively, identifying opportunities to improve systems and processes over time.   

What you’ll need to be successful   

• Experience developing and maintaining production backend systems, ideally in Go or a similar backend language. 
• Experience in a domain relevant to phone scams, such as telecoms, phone or messaging systems, or fraud and anti-abuse. You don’t need to have worked at a telco, but you should bring relevant experience from an adjacent area.
• The ability to work independently and take ownership of services and systems.  
• Strong attention to detail, particularly when working with production systems.  
• A proactive mindset when addressing operational issues or incidents.  
• Experience working with SQL databases (such as MySQL or MariaDB), including schema design, and writing and optimising complex queries.  
• Experience with version control systems, such as Git, and CI/CD pipelines.  
• Good written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts clearly and concisely.  
• Open to using AI tooling in software development. 

Bonus points if you have   

• Experience with Perl.
• Exposure to Docker, Kubernetes, or other containerisation technologies.  
• Experience working on large or long-lived production systems.  
• A keen interest in cybercrime or cyber security.
• Experience with ML/LLM classification or automation.
• Familiarity with telecoms, VoIP, or messaging technologies (e.g. SIP, SMPP, number routing).
• Comfortable using configuration management tools, such as Puppet.
• Experience with TypeScript.  

The Rewards Package

• 33 days annual leave - includes public holidays which can be worked if you prefer 
• Generous enhanced family leave and pay 
• Enhanced Sick Pay from day 1, rising to 12 weeks full pay after 6 months 
• Salary sacrifice pension with matched employer contributions up to 5% + NI savings 
• Private health cover, including access to a private GP service 
• Life Assurance at 4 x salary 
• Equity tracking scheme (eligibility criteria apply) - allowing you share in Netcraft's long term success 
• Hybrid and flexible working options 
• Meals, snacks, and drinks provided in the office 
• Comprehensive health, safety, and wellness service available 24/7 for you and your family 
• Two paid Learning & Development days per year plus access to learning resources such as Udemy and Coursera to support your career 
• Two Volunteering Days per year, to allow you to contribute to your wider community or charity 
• Employee Referral Bonus scheme 
• Spot reward bonus scheme to reward truly outstanding contributions