Senior Backend Engineer (Python / FastAPI) Scrum Master

Description

The team works within a computational science and informatics group in a diagnostics business. It builds the software behind digital products for the life sciences sector, with a focus on earlier diagnosis and personalized treatment.

The role is for an experienced backend Python engineer who also acts as Scrum Master. You will work with the frontend/UX team and data scientists on the backend that stores, processes and serves bioinformatics and machine learning data.

The work includes query tuning on very large datasets and building cloud-native systems on AWS. The team needs clean API boundaries and high reliability as the platforms grow.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain fast, asynchronous backend services and reliable RESTful APIs.
• Design, deploy and run scalable, secure cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code.
• Design database schemas, handle complex data relationships, run migrations and optimize queries over massive datasets.
• Build and maintain pipelines that ingest, normalize and process large volumes of structured and unstructured scientific and bioinformatics data.
• Write clean, testable code, add thorough automated tests and keep CI/CD pipelines reliable.
• Work directly with the UX/frontend team on API integrations and with data scientists to move machine learning models into production workflows.
• Scrum Master work (20% of the role): act as a servant leader for the development team, apply Scrum principles to keep work moving, resolve conflicts and make progress visible.
• Remove blockers for the team and use proven Agile techniques to drive continuous improvement.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with Python as your main language.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals, including strong API design and experience building and scaling RESTful systems.
• Good understanding of relational databases, data modeling, schema migrations and query optimization.
• Proven experience building, deploying and managing scalable cloud infrastructure, ideally with Infrastructure as Code.
• A strong focus on code quality, automated testing and maintainability within CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to make progress when requirements are unclear, owning problems from user needs through to production-ready delivery.
• Hands-on experience with, or the ability to quickly learn, our core stack: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, AWS (S3, Aurora, Fargate, Lambda, CDK), pytest and NumPy.
• First-level Scrum Master certification (CSM or PSM I).
• At least two years as Scrum Master for a software development team that applied Scrum principles, practices and theory diligently.
• Good skills in servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment and increasing transparency.
• Familiarity with the many documented patterns and techniques for filling the intentional gaps in Scrum.
• Nice-to-have: interest in or knowledge of life sciences, especially sequencing, PCR, bioinformatics or digital healthcare.
• Nice-to-have: direct experience with AWS HealthOmics or building data pipelines for genomic or biological data.
• Nice-to-have: background in data-heavy or AI-integrated product architecture, and an interest in how AI/ML systems behave in production.
• Nice-to-have: prior work in large, globally distributed enterprise settings such as pharma or medtech.

Conditions

This is an on-site position with no relocation assistance.

The company is an equal opportunity employer.