Senior Python Developer

Senior Backend Django Developer

Location: UK (Remote)
Salary: £70,000 – £80,000 (DOE)

About the Company

A rapidly growing digital media and publishing start-up business that is redefining how local and specialist journalism reaches its audience. At its core is an integrated publishing platform designed to serve and connect journalists with the communities they cover, enabling content creators to own and operate their own fully branded media outlets rather than relying on traditional, centralised publishers.

The business operates a network of independent sports-focused platforms delivering high-quality editorial content, in-depth analysis, community reporting, and subscription products to passionate fan bases across the UK. It is built on the belief that local reporting isn’t dying, it just needs technology that empowers journalists and audiences to engage directly with each other.

Using its proprietary platform, journalists can create content, manage subscription data, run marketing campaigns, and monitor earnings from a single dashboard, helping grow sustainable local media brands with loyal readerships. The platform supports multiple live, revenue-generating products with growing subscriber bases.

This is a company where technology, editorial excellence, and community engagement intersect, and where the engineering team plays a key role in powering products that support real journalism, expand reach, and help creators work at scale.

The Role

This is a senior, hands-on position responsible for the design, development, and ongoing operation of core backend systems. You will act as a key technical owner across backend architecture, infrastructure, and operational stability, with real influence over technical direction.

The role suits an experienced backend engineer who enjoys working close to production systems, improving reliability, and taking ownership of both application code and the environments, it runs in. As the platform continues to grow, this role will play a key part in scaling systems, improving operational maturity, and shaping how the backend supports new products and revenue models.

You will be successful in this role if you enjoy taking ownership, improving systems incrementally, and being relied upon as a technical authority within a small but capable engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain core backend services and APIs
• Design, develop, and maintain Django-based applications and REST APIs
• Manage background task processing and asynchronous workflows
• Ensure system reliability, scalability, and performance in production
• Work closely with frontend developers building JavaScript-based applications
• Support and improve deployment, monitoring, and operational processes
• Diagnose and resolve production issues and system failures
• Contribute to architectural decisions and long-term technical strategy
• Maintain technical documentation and system-level knowledge

 
Skills & Experience

• Strong experience with Python and Django
• Solid understanding of backend system design and operational concerns
• Experience building and maintaining APIs using Django Rest Framework (DRF)
• Experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL
• Experience with asynchronous task queues such as Celery
• Familiarity with message brokers such as RabbitMQ and/or Redis
• Experience containerising applications using Docker
• Comfortable working with Git and collaborative development workflows
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of complex systems

 
Desirable

• Experience integrating payment systems such as Stripe
• DevOps or infrastructure experience (CI/CD, deployments, monitoring)
• Experience working with Cloudflare or similar edge/CDN services
• Understanding of JavaScript-based frontend architectures
• Experience operating and supporting production systems at scale
• Interest in system reliability, observability, and performance optimisation

If you are interested please apply ASAP. The People Network is an employment agency and will respond to all applicants within three - five working days. If you do not hear within these timescales please feel free to get in touch.