Lead Python Backend Engineer

Company Description

At The Stepstone Group, we have a simple yet very important mission: The right job for everyone. Using our data, platform, and technology, we create opportunities for jobseekers and companies around the world to find a perfect match in fair and equitable way. With over 20 brands across 30+ countries, we strive for fair and unbiased hiring. Join our team of 3,000+ employees and be part of reshaping the labour market and becoming the world's leading job platform.

Job Description

As a Senior Software Engineer and AI Enthusiast, you will join the
Marketplace Enablement
department. In this team we're enabling AI-based searching, matching, and ranking of talent to job ads. You will join an international team of Data Scientsts, Big Data Engineers, ML Engineers, and Cloud Engineers as a technical lead.

Your expertise will help create a more inclusive and efficient recruitment experience globally, directly supporting our mission to reshape the labour market for everyone. You will have a strong sense of ownership and proactively provide solutions before a situation deteriorates.

Your Responsibilities

• Lead from alignment with Product vision via solution design with our Staff Engineers to successful implementation and value creation.
• Champion code quality by applying best practices like clean code, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, security, and Federated Governance.
• Work on a diverse set of technologies for LLM-deployments (e.g. Sagemaker with vLLM), streaming data solutions (Kafka), Data Lakes (AWS Glue) and complex orchestrations (Airflow) tasks.
• Collaborate and mentor in an international, agile, cross-functional team, helping others grow and succeed.
• Contribute to building an inclusive team culture where every voice is valued.

Your Skills & Qualifications

• Proven track record of deploying secure and robust systems at scale with a professional level of Python (7+ years).
• Strong experience with AWS cloud services (e.g., EMR, Glue, ECS with Docker, Redshift, DynamoDB, S3) and understanding of cloud-native architectures (3+ years).
• Solid experience with Apache Kafka (MSK) for real-time data ingestion and processing (1+ years).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and Huggingface Transformers (considered a plus).
• Genuine passion for leveraging data and AI to solve complex problems and make a tangible impact (professional experience is considered a plus).
• Excellent communication skills in spoken and written English (B2+ level).
• We value different career paths — if you have taken career breaks, switched disciplines, or balanced work with family life, we still encourage you to apply.

If you don't meet every single requirement but are excited about this role, we still would love to see you applying.

Please submit your CV in English, as it will be reviewed by our international team.

Additional Information

Your benefits

We're a community here that cares as much about your life outside work as how you feel when you're with us. Because your job shouldn't take over your life, it should enrich it. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• 30 days of holidays + 2 extra days for Christmas and New Year's Eve
• Hybrid working model
• Company pension scheme
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
• Life Assurance Cover
• Volunteering days
• Job bike
• Discounted parking or job ticket
• In-house gym
• In-house barista
• And you can bring your dog to the office

Our commitment

Equal opportunities are important to us. We believe that diversity and inclusion at The Stepstone Group are critical to our success as a global company, so we want to recruit, develop, and keep the best talent. We encourage applications from everyone, regardless of background, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, ethnicity, belief, age, family or parental status, and any other characteristic.