Senior Backend Engineer

Publicis Groupe · London

Company description

Publicis Media harnesses the power of modern media through leading agency brands Dysrupt, Infinite Roar, Publicis Collective, Publicis Health Media, Spark Foundry, Starcom and Zenith, as well as global accelerator PMX; immersive experience group PMCI and access to integrated platform-based technologies and offerings from CJ, Epsilon and Influential.

A key business solution of Publicis Groupe, Publicis Media’s digital-first, data-driven global solutions deliver client value and drive growth in a platform-powered world. It is present in over 100 countries with over 23,000 employees worldwide.

About Performics & OneSuite

Performics is the Performance Centre of Excellence within Publicis Groupe, delivering technology, data, and AI-driven marketing solutions for global brands. OneSuite is our unified marketing intelligence and automation platform powering agentic workflows, data processing, analytics services, and channel automation across Search, Social, Programmatic, Commerce, and Measurement.

Backend and data engineering are foundational across OneSuite — providing the APIs, data pipelines, integration layers, orchestration runtimes, and backend systems that power campaign activation across Search, Social, Commerce, Programmatic, and Measurement.

Overview

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to lead the design, development, and evolution of backend systems and data pipelines across OneSuite.

This is a hands-on engineering role — you will write production-grade code, solve complex distributed systems and data engineering problems, shape backend and pipeline patterns, and guide other engineers through technical influence.

As a Senior individual contributor, you will help define service architecture, enforce engineering best practices, and collaborate across teams to ensure OneSuite’s backend systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and performant.

Responsibilities

Core Responsibilities

Backend Architecture & System Design

Architect distributed backend services and APIs using Python, FastAPI, or equivalent frameworks.
Design modular, observable, and scalable backend components for orchestration, data pipelines, and platform integrations.
Define patterns for microservices, domain boundaries, caching, queuing, resiliency, and error handling.
Build robust service-to-service communication mechanisms (REST, gRPC, event-driven patterns).
Implement secure authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and multi-tenant access controls.

Data Engineering & Pipeline Development

Design and maintain data pipelines using PySpark and Databricks, following the medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) for structured data transformation and quality.
Build and optimize ETL/ELT workflows that ingest, transform, and serve marketing performance data at scale.
Collaborate with analytics and data science teams to ensure clean, well-modeled, and accessible data assets across the lakehouse.
Implement data quality checks, schema enforcement, and lineage tracking across pipeline stages.

Hands-On Backend Development

Write high-quality, maintainable, production-ready code.
Integrate with external APIs (marketing platforms, cloud services, internal microservices).
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code environments.
Lead code reviews, mentor engineers, and ensure high engineering standards.
Contribute to platform SDKs, internal libraries, and backend frameworks used across the platform.

Performance, Reliability & Observability

Implement tracing, structured logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
Optimize services for latency, concurrency, throughput, and cost efficiency.
Ensure system reliability through automated testing, load testing, error budgets, and resiliency strategies.
Partner with SRE to define SLIs/SLOs and improve platform-wide reliability.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work closely with product, data, and SRE teams on shared backend designs across campaign activation domains.
Align architecture decisions across teams to ensure consistency and maintainability.

Qualifications

Must Have

Extensive backend engineering experience, with architectural ownership over services or distributed systems.
Expertise in Python, FastAPI, and Flask with modern backend development patterns.
Strong understanding of microservices, concurrency, async programming, and event-driven architectures.
Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, MongoDB) and familiarity with lakehouse platforms.
Experience with or strong willingness to work in PySpark and Databricks, including the medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold).
Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CloudFormation, and cloud platforms (AWS or GCP).
Strong CI/CD experience using GitHub Actions, Argo, or similar tools.
Deep knowledge of observability practices — logs, metrics, traces, performance analysis.
Proven ability to write clean, testable, well-structured production code.

Nice to Have

Experience with streaming or queuing systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS).
Familiarity with AI/LLM systems and agentic workflow integration.
Experience with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, or other lakehouse governance and optimization tools.
Prior experience with API gateway architectures, caching layers, or service meshes.
Full stack engineering with product experience
A curious mind with memorable stories to share and hobbies that surprise people

Core Competencies

Technical Expertise: You own backend architecture and data pipeline design across services, solving complex distributed systems and data engineering problems while defining reusable patterns that improve scalability, reliability, and developer velocity.

Leadership: You lead through influence — mentoring engineers, guiding architectural decisions, establishing engineering standards, and elevating backend craftsmanship without direct people management.

Product Impact: Your backend systems directly shape OneSuite’s performance, availability, and functionality across campaign activation for Search, Social, Commerce, Programmatic, and Measurement.

Innovation & Learning: You stay current with emerging architecture patterns, cloud-native technologies, data platforms, and backend frameworks. You introduce pragmatic innovations that deliver measurable engineering and product value.

Collaboration: You work across teams — aligning backend direction and ensuring platform cohesion across campaign activation domains. You communicate clearly, build consensus, and drive clarity in complex system discussions.

Additional information

Publicis Media offers a wide range of benefits to support our employees. Full details are shared when you join, but highlights include core benefits such as Pension, Life Assurance, and Private Medical cover, alongside enhanced policies like Reflection Days and Shared Parental Leave. You’ll also have access to a range of additional initiatives, including:

📖 Please check out the Publicis Career Page which showcases our Inclusive Benefits and our EAG’s (Employee Action Groups).

Publicis Groupe works primarily from the office or our clients' office four days per week.

At Publicis Media, we are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age, citizenship, relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic.

We are committed to providing a fair, accessible, and inclusive recruitment process. If you have any access needs - for example, related to disability, neurodivergence, or a health condition - please let us know. We’ll work with you to ensure the process works for you. Sharing this information will never impact your application.

Guided by our values, we listen with empathy, uplift each other, take responsibility, and embrace change - building a culture where everyone feels seen, respected, and genuinely included.