Senior Backend Engineer Engineering

Elder is actively seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to scale and optimise the services offered to customers and carers on their platform.

The role of the technology team at Elder is to set Elder apart from the rest with meaningful use of technology - their technology platform powers the rest of the business. They build web applications that connect families and carers with each other and Elder. They use data, algorithms, and machine learning to find the right carer to look after each customer. In 2025, they plan to continue becoming the UK’s leading live-in care provider and deliver a best in class service.

The team is looking for a talented Kotlin/Java backend engineer with a passion for cloud infrastructure. The engineer will work with backend and frontend developers to build new functionality that enables Elder to connect families with carers and arrange live-in care at scale nationally.

The company started on Java and Spring, moved to Kotlin for all new development, and uses a CQRS architecture with event sourcing for most microservices. Systems run on Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This role includes ownership of GCP infrastructure, observability, and platform reliability, with a focus on security, scalability, and maintenance.

Engineers are involved in the full development lifecycle from brainstorming to seeing product usage. This role suits backend engineers interested in building reliable, scalable smart platforms solving real-world problems beyond just coding predefined ideas.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Working directly with product managers, frontend engineers, and the wider business to shape technology-powered product solutions
• Close collaboration within the backend engineering team via code reviews, pair programming, knowledge sharing to maintain best practices and platform consistency
• Implementing, testing, and releasing new functionality across Elder’s backend systems focused on matching algorithms and system integrations
• Collaborating with frontend engineers to build new APIs and data contracts to support new functionality
• Maintaining and evolving cloud infrastructure (GCP, Kubernetes) to ensure high availability, security, and performance
• Managing service observability and reliability including logging, metrics, and alerting using Prometheus and Grafana
• Handling database and service upgrades (e.g. MySQL, Kubernetes), secrets management, and security best practices
• Taking ownership of platform-level concerns such as deployment pipelines, configuration management, and cost awareness
• Driving pragmatic AI utilisation across the development lifecycle, including tools like Claude Code, OAI Codex, Google Jules and other AI coding agents

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, comfortable working independently and with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience working on backend platforms using modern architectures such as microservices or serverless, including deploying to production
• Strong fundamentals of Java or Kotlin development practices
• Good grasp of principles behind building reliable and scalable systems, including redundancy, time complexity, and memory management
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and container orchestration, ideally Kubernetes on GCP, with strong understanding of platform reliability, cost awareness, and secure configuration
• Solid understanding of security best practices across infrastructure and applications, including secrets management and credential rotation; familiarity with infrastructure-as-code or automation tools is a plus
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, service monitoring, and debugging in production environments
• Demonstrated interest in staying up-to-date with new technology, frameworks, languages and developments like AI
• Passion for working collaboratively to solve meaningful real-world problems with technology, not just writing code
• Experience with CQRS/event sourcing is a bonus but not required; likely favorable to functional style programming patterns