{"id":2119875,"url":"https://alion.io/job/extrac-senior-backend-software-engineer","title":"Senior Backend Software Engineer","company":{"id":4333564,"name":"ExTrac","domain":"extrac.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/extrac","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":93000,"max_usd":184000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":114},"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Trunk-Based Development","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-30T10:13:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-11T18:29:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":11,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":11},"description":"About ExTrac\nExTrac is a decision intelligence company used by governments, defence organisations, financial institutions, and corporates operating in complex, fast-moving environments. Our capabilities fuse curated data sources, domain-specific AI, and deep human expertise to transform information overload into clear, actionable foresight.\nOur ambition is to become the analytical backbone that organisations rely on when geopolitical uncertainty becomes an opportunity or a strategic risk. More at extrac.ai.\nThe Role\nWe are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join ExTrac's engineering team to help build and operate the services and pipelines the platform runs on.\nExTrac takes a continuously ingested, multi-source corpus and turns it into products analysts use to make decisions under time pressure. You will be responsible for building and running the backend microservices that make that possible: services and databases that expose curated data through APIs, run search and aggregation over large indices, hold application state, and keep the whole thing fast and correct as volume and customer count grow.\nThe work is broad by design. In a single quarter it spans API and service design, search and database performance, long-running data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and the deployment tooling underneath all of it. You will own services end to end across a Go and Python codebase, working alongside the AI team who build our analytical and agentic features, the frontend team who build the web and mobile interfaces, and the analysts and product managers who define what gets built.\nWhat the job involves\nService design and delivery\nTake an ambiguous problem, gather requirements, write a technical design, and ship to production with minimal oversight.\n\nOwn services end to end, including consolidating or decommissioning what they replace.\n\nContribute to and lead system design and architecture decisions.\n\nDesign APIs used by both internal teams and customers, and hold them to clear contracts and sensible versioning as the number of consumers grows.\n\nTreat the storage layer as a design concern rather than an implementation detail: schema, indexing strategy, and access patterns. Establish clear access patterns and boundaries.\n\nProduction engineering\nDevelop Go and Python-based microservices to support data collection, processing, and querying.\n\nHold services to production standards for latency, cost, and reliability, with the instrumentation in place to know when they are not meeting them.\n\nBuild and operate high-throughput data streaming pipelines and work on improving scalability, robustness, and latency.\n\nOptimise databases and index performance where it is the constraint on product behaviour.\n\nWorking with analysts, product, and the ML team\nWork directly with the analysts who use our products, turning what they hit in practice into changes in the system.\n\nIterate quickly against a live stream of product requests, flagging where they collide with longer-horizon platform work.\n\nPartner with the AI and frontend teams to deliver cross-functional features, solving the engineering, performance, and reliability problems that sit outside of their scope.\n\nImprove the shared foundations other engineers depend on: deployment pipelines, service templates, observability, and the environments their work runs in.\n\nYou should apply if\nYou have built and operated production backend systems. You will spend your time working on and owning Go and Python services, databases, and APIs, and you know the difference between something that works on a laptop and something that holds up under production load, latency, and cost.\n\nYou can operate with a high degree of autonomy. You will be trusted to lead projects, make decisions, and drive outcomes. We work on open-ended problems with no established answer, and when the obvious approach fails you generate alternatives rather than stopping.\n\nYou do not trust a change until you have measured it. Reaching for the profiler, the trace, or the metric is instinct rather than afterthought.\n\nYou treat quality, security, and observability as engineering fundamentals rather than optional extras, and you make the case for addressing technical debt rather than living with it.\n\nYou raise the bar for the engineers around you in ways they would recognise: pairing on problems outside your own project, leaving reviews people learn from, and writing things down for the next person.\n\nYou want to work on things that matter. Our software sits underneath decisions taken by governments, defence organisations, and institutions operating where being wrong or late carries real consequences.\n\nWhere this role can take you\nDeepen your ownership. Strong performance means ownership over larger sections of the platform, more architectural say over how our services evolve, and more influence over which problems we take on.\n\nBreadth rather than a narrow track. The work follows the problem, which means service design one month and pipeline or infrastructure work the next. Engineers here have the opportunity to build depth across several areas rather than being funnelled into one.\n\nProgress without changing track. ExTrac values the IC and management paths equally: Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager sit at the same level, and taking on reports is not the price of progression.\n\nRequirements\nDue to the nature of our work and the clients we support, applicants must be eligible to obtain UK security clearance. We are currently only able to consider applicants who are nationals of a NATO member state, Australia, or New Zealand.\n4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to stand up production-grade services and experience owning features end to end.\n\nProficiency in building microservices using Go or Python.\n\nSolid understanding of distributed systems, databases, and software engineering patterns.\n\nExperience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code, and with the CI/CD pipelines around them.\n\nStrong communication and collaboration skills. Comfortable writing clear technical documentation and discussing requirements with colleagues from engineering and the wider team.\n\nBreadth across the stack: improving deployment pipelines, understanding database behaviour, and a genuine interest in security engineering.\n\nAn interest in how the product is actually used, and a willingness to take analyst feedback into requirements discussions rather than treating requirements as someone else's problem.\n\nDesirable\nCurrently working with Go-based microservices.\n\nExperience with Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL.\n\nExperience with streaming or event-driven pipelines.\n\nExperience with feature flags and trunk-based development. Features land close to weekly, and individual deploys go out several times a day across several projects.\n\nExperience operating multi-tenant systems where data isolation is a hard requirement.\n\nExperience working in software for defence, government, or other compliance-constrained environments.\n\nInterview Process\nInitial Intro Interview with Hiring Manager - 30 Minutes\n\nTechnical Assessment - 1 hour\n\nCompetency-based Interview - 1 hour\n\nFounder Interview - 30 Minutes\n\nBenefits\nCompetitive salary based on skills and experience.\n\nA generous benefits package, including Private Medical Health Insurance and enhanced pension contributions.\n\nEnhanced parental leave and a workplace nursery scheme.\n\n£500/year education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.\n\n33 days of leave across the year inclusive of bank holidays.\n\nFlexible working. The team is typically in our central London office two days a week, and you are welcome to come in up to five.\n\nExTrac AI provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.\nExTrac AI is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing open role within our organisation. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position but all hiring decisions will be made by a member of our team.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8550,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule","Health insurance","Parental leave","Workplace nursery"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-08T23:54:59Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.865,"p_room":1,"age_days":9,"expected_fill_days":39,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/extrac-senior-backend-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/extrac-senior-backend-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T21:48:17Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":10982,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4333564},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4333564"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fextrac-senior-backend-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fextrac-senior-backend-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fextrac-senior-backend-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/extrac-senior-backend-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fextrac-senior-backend-software-engineer"}]}