Location
London - Hybrid working with two remote days per week. Mondays and Thursdays are all-Zoopla office days, plus a third in-office day of your choosing. Our office is located near Tower Bridge, close to London Bridge, Tower Hill and Bermondsey stations, with plenty of food and riverside spots nearby.

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Not specified

About the Role
Zoopla is one of the UK’s most recognised property brands, visited by over 50 million people monthly. Our mission is to help the nation make better home decisions by connecting everyone to their home and providing personalised insights for moving, managing, or financing. As a Senior Backend Engineer (Search), you will design and operate the search and retrieval systems behind our consumer portal, serving millions of users. This role focuses on search relevance, ranking, and the data pipelines that support them. You will primarily work with Python and TypeScript (Node.js and GraphQL), with some services in Golang or Perl. You will own the search infrastructure end to end on OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch), including indexing, query design, relevance tuning, and performance at scale. You will design and maintain APIs and data pipelines across SQL and NoSQL stores on AWS. While this is a backend role, occasional frontend work with React and TypeScript may be required. Join us to transform how the nation makes home decisions in a dynamic, innovative environment.

Experience
- Senior engineer with experience building and operating high scale systems serving millions of users, able to explain trade-offs made.
- Production experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch including indexing strategy, query and relevance tuning, and cluster health management.
- Strong distributed systems and system design skills, with understanding of consistency, latency, failure modes, and scalability.
- Hands-on AWS experience running production services.
- Fluency in backend development with Python and TypeScript, designing and building APIs and services across SQL and NoSQL stores.

About you
- Passionate about shipping product features with high autonomy, taking ideas from problem to production with minimal guidance.
- Excellent communication skills with a proven track record of collaborating closely with Product and Design teams to deliver features from ambiguous goals.
- Strong engineering craft: maintainable code, code reviews, pairing when helpful, and meaningful tests.
- Focus on building for stability, security, observability, and performance beyond the happy path.
- Commercial mindset connecting your work to business outcomes.
- Comfortable using AI tools as part of your development workflow, understanding their benefits and limitations.

Qualifications
Not explicitly specified, but senior-level experience and strong technical skills as described are essential.