Senior Backend Developer

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Job description

Guardian Media Group (GMG) is a leading global media organisation, the publisher of the Guardian, which celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2021, the Observer and the Guardian.com, which attracts over 200 million global unique browsers each month. We are renowned for our ground breaking independent journalism and our award-winning digital products.

That is where you come in.

We are looking for a Senior Backend Developer to join our growing team.

About the role

• You'll mostly be programming in Scala, running in AWS, but we use the tool that best fits the problem.
• You'll be working in a cross-functional team, which is empowered to rapidly iterate and release new features.
• You won't be coding in isolation - our culture is strongly collaborative, whether pair programming with other developers or working closely with editorial and commercial colleagues.

About You

As a Senior Backend Developer, you'll be equally willing to dive into a purely functional and composable Scala back-end or work with a variety of database and streaming technologies.

• You inspire the people you work with, and are inspired by them in return.
• You contribute to the direction of your team's products.
• You are passionate about spreading engineering best practice beyond your immediate team.

What we offer

• Flexible working (see below for details)
• Generous pension scheme; if you contribute 5% then the Guardian will contribute 8-12% (depending on your age)
• Mental and Physical Health insurance and dental scheme
• 26 days annual leave and the option to purchase an extra 5 days
• Up to 18 weeks of parental leave at full pay
• Multi-faith prayer room
• Cycle to work scheme and subsidised gym membership
• Paid volunteering days
• Annual season ticket loan

More about flexible working

We encourage flexible working to better balance the needs of the company and employees as their circumstances change over time, and in order to attract and retain a diverse team. No two situations are identical, so please discuss with us at or before offer stage. In order to help applicants, here are some broad guidelines of the level of flexibility we are able to give for remote working. With the current pandemic situation almost everyone is currently working from home all the time, but this is a temporary situation and we are currently not forecasting to have people remote working all their time in the medium term, once the situation will enable people to commute and work safely from the office.

If you are a full time employee and wish to work at home, expect to be required to work in the office while you get up to speed, and then at least 60% time in the office after that in order to maintain a relationship with the wider team. In the long term it may be possible to go as low as 1 day a week.

We strive for transparency in remuneration. The salary for new senior developers at the Guardian is £65.2k.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds, different lived experiences and different perspectives. A diverse team means we can better reflect and engage our global audience. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool, and also in including them, fostering a culture where people's voices can be heard and our employees look forward to coming to work.

Application instructions:

To apply please upload your CV. You must already have the right to work in the UK.

Our interview process involves 2 stages: a face to face interview and a pairing test, we are currently running the interview process remotely.

About us

We value and respect all differences in all people (seen and unseen) at the Guardian. We aspire to inclusive working experiences and an environment that reflects the audience we serve, where our people have equal access to career development opportunities, their voices are heard and can contribute to our future. The Guardian actively encourages applications from BAME candidates.

At The Guardian, many of our staff work flexibly and we will consider all requests for flexible working arrangements.