Backend Engineer - CX

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected].

About the team

When something goes wrong after a sale, the CX squad makes sure it gets fixed fast, visibly and fairly, so a bad first transaction becomes a reason to come back rather than a reason to leave.

We own the systems behind what happens after checkout:

• Disputes and the in-app Dispute Resolution Centre, including self-serve returns and refunds
• Auto-cancellation and the protections that tell buyers and sellers when an order is covered and resolved
• AI-driven support automation and the APIs and integrations that power it
• Internal ops tooling and integrations with our customer support platforms

Our data suggests that problems resolved in-product retain users better than anything that goes through a human agent, so our job is to automate the repeatable cases and leave the hard calls to people.

What you’ll be doing

• Build and evolve the backend services and APIs behind disputes, returns, auto-cancellation and support automation, from design through to production
• Build and test the integrations that let our AI support look up and act on orders, refunds and shipping
• Work with CX Operations to decide where automation should act on its own and when it should hand off to a person
• Design solutions ahead of delivery for small-to-medium problems, and contribute to the design of larger pieces of work in the team
• Own the health of the services you work on: monitoring, alerting, on-call, fixing what breaks and paying down tech debt
• Work in an experiment-led squad: define hypotheses and success metrics, run A/B tests and ship behind feature flags
• Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science and CX Operations, and with partner teams such as Payments and Shipping when work crosses boundaries
• Take part in code reviews, retros and post-incident reviews, and help teammates get unblocked

Why this role is exciting

• Your work directly affects whether a user who had a bad experience stays on Depop
• You’ll help shape AI-driven support in a fast-moving area with plenty of room to try new things
• You’ll join a small team where engineers get real ownership and stay close to the user impact

What we’re looking for

Core requirements

• Solid backend engineering fundamentals and experience delivering production services, mostly on your own
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Scala, Java, Kotlin or Python, and willingness to pick up others (most of our services are Scala)
• Experience building secure, reliable APIs used by external systems, including authentication, error handling and safe retries
• Experience with relational databases and data modelling
• Understanding of event-driven or asynchronous systems (queues, scheduled jobs, workflows)
• Good testing habits at unit and integration level
• Experience with CI/CD and production monitoring, and taking part in on-call

How you work

• You’ll often own problems end to end, in an area where AI tools keep changing, so you’re comfortable setting your own direction and working things out.
• You measure your work by whether it resolves customer issues, using data to check what’s working and what isn’t
• You explain technical trade-offs in plain terms, share context openly and ask questions when things are unclear

Helpful experience, but we value learning just as much

• Customer support platforms such as Zendesk, including their apps, APIs or workflows
• AI support agents or chatbots: configuring their workflows, or connecting them to backend systems through APIs, tools or function calling
• Payments, orders, refunds or shipping domains
• Marketplace or e-commerce experience
• Running experiments and feature flags with tools such as Optimizely
• Kafka or other message brokers, workflow engines, Docker and Kubernetes, AWS and infrastructure-as-code

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!