Senior Backend Developer

Who We Are

At Certn, we're revolutionizing background screening with The World's Easiest Background Check — fast, global, and powered by tech. We're not about outdated processes and red tape. We're about innovation, speed, and impact. If you're looking for a place where ownership, collaboration, and creativity thrive, this is it.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer to help lead the design, development, and evolution of our backend systems. In this role, you'll be responsible for creating robust backend services, driving best practices, and collaborating across teams to deliver impactful solutions. You'll also mentor others, contribute to architectural decisions, and ensure our systems are scalable, reliable, and secure.

Key Responsibilities

Software Development

• Design, implement and evolve back-end features with a strong emphasis on testability, maintainability and extensibility.

• Set and uphold a high standard of code and system quality across the back-end domain. Lead, coach or champion best practices (unit/integration testing, code reviews, clean architecture).

• Collaborate cross-functionally: work with product, DevOps and infrastructure teams to deliver holistic end-to-end solutions and ensure seamless integration between user-facing and server-side systems.

• Improve system performance, scalability and reliability: proactively identify bottlenecks, optimize database queries and data flows, refactor legacy services and resolve defects in production and staging environments.

• Write comprehensive tests (unit, integration, end-to-end) for both new and existing code bases to ensure high confidence in deployment and changes.

• Monitor deployment pipelines, live environments, and service metrics. Take ownership of the health, observability and correctness of your team's code in production.

Architecture & System Design

• Identify opportunities to improve system design, including microservices, API design, data modelling, caching strategies, and service orchestration.

• Contribute to defining new patterns and architectures in our back-end ecosystem, and drive adoption across the engineering organization.

• Work closely with adjacent teams (platform, infrastructure, security) to ensure new designs are aligned with infrastructure, security, operations and scaling requirements.

• Make trade-offs consciously: balance performance, cost, maintainability, and developer productivity when designing or evolving services.

• Mentor peers through architectural reviews, design discussions and by sharing rationales and documentation for chosen approaches.

Architecture & System Design

• Provide technical mentorship to others through coaching and paired coding

• Document your work to inform future units of work or explain concepts and principles to other developers & stakeholders

Project Planning

• Contribute to the technical discovery of projects

• Create tickets for technical work that are a result of technical investigations

• Contribute to the scoping of project work in various scrum ceremonies

• Support project leads by ensuring the right thing gets built

• Lead projects through the technical discovery, execution, and deployment stages

Key Requirements

• Work closely with peers - other back-end engineers, DevOps/infra teams, front-end teams - in a collaborative manner to solve complex system-level problems.

• Communicate your perspectives on improvements in team discussions, advocate for optimal back-end architecture, patterns or trade-offs.

• Continuously leave things better than you found them. Champion improvements in team practices, processes, tooling (especially for back-end development, deployment, observability) to help reliably deliver high-quality results.

• Apply strong software- engineering principles in a team context so that back-end code is accessible, maintainable, extensible and scalable.

• Release large-scale back-end applications (and optionally front-end where relevant) into production environments.

• Develop and test server-side logic using languages and frameworks such as Python Django (or equivalent), with minimal involvement in CSS/HTML only when necessary.

• Architect, implement and test APIs, data models, high-throughput services and asynchronous workflows.

• Write and execute a full spectrum of tests - from unit tests, integration tests, to end-to-end functional tests - to ensure correctness and reliability across back-end systems.

Why You Should Be Excited

Flexibility: Remote-first role with teammates across North America and the UK

Global Collaboration: Partner with experienced engineers in multiple regions

Compensation: Competitive salary, comprehensive health benefits, generous paid time off.

Culture: Collaborative, async-friendly, and innovation-focused.

We believe talent knows no borders, and we're open to candidates from the UK and beyond.

A Little Bit More About Us

Certn is a growing global technology company reinventing the way organizations build trust in people with technology and AI-backed background checks. Having recently been named one of Canada's Companies-to-Watch in Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Awards, we are one of the fastest-growing start-ups in the sector. Just so you know, the selected candidate will be required to complete a background check — so you'll get to see first-hand what we do. Certn is committed to equal opportunity, inclusion, and diversity. If you have a disability that requires accommodation at any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know how we can best assist you.

Ready to build your career and make an impact? Apply now and start your journey with Certn.

---