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Senior Backend Engineer (Remote EU)

Location:
United Kingdom
Salary:
Competitive
Job Type:
Permanent
Date Posted:
about 2 hours ago
Expiry Date:
13/01/2027
Job Ref:
129414
Start Date:
15/10/2026
Contact:
Matthew Rees-Davis
Contact Email:
matthew.rees-davis@xcede.com
Specialism:

Product Engineer, Discovery — AI Creator Platform (Remote, CET ±3h)

Via Xcede — confidential search

Fast-growing · real revenue · Gen AI · Remote, CET ±3h overlap · Full-time · Europe-based preferred

The company

One of the fastest-growing products in the AI creator economy. People create AI characters — including verified AI “twins” of themselves — and generate ultra-realistic photos and videos with them. Small, talented team with a Europe-centric core, growing fast on real revenue, evolving from a creation tool into a full content network where creators publish and people discover, follow, and buy.

The role

Own how people find content on the platform: search, ranking, feeds, and following creators. Heavy on systems and backend, with React end to end.

What you’ll own

  • Search, tags, and ranking
  • Personalized feeds that stay fast as the catalog grows
  • Following creators and the social graph behind it
  • The React side of all of it

Your first 8 weeks

  • You own search or the feed and the team trusts you with it.
  • Search results people actually use, with a quality measure the team trusts.
  • A ranking or feed change shipped and measured.

Who you are

  • 4+ years on backend systems in Go or a similar typed language, with Postgres and production React.
  • Search & ranking: relevance, cold start for new content, embeddings — in production.
  • Performance: indexes, caching, and data models that stay fast at scale.
  • Measurement: you measure quality against outcomes and know which number to trust.
  • AI-native: agent tooling every day, held to the same bar as everything else you ship.
  • Strong plus: consumer social feeds, recommendation systems, creator platforms.
  • Not a fit: frontend-only engineers, or anyone who tunes ranking without measuring it.

What you must know

Agents write much of the code here — you’re hired to know when it’s wrong. This gets tested live, with no agent and no framework to lean on: reading a query plan and fixing a slow query, understanding isolation levels and deadlocks; tracing a request end to end and designing retries that stay safe when a timed-out call may have actually succeeded; reading a CPU/memory profile, reasoning about concurrency, adding backpressure before a queue falls over; picking the right data structure for a real task and knowing its costs — including when a simple scan is the right answer.

How they work

Lean on purpose — a handful of people ship what most companies need fifty for. Small teams of 3-4 own an area end to end, no ticket-takers, no waiting on a perfect spec. AI is used daily but never blindly — everything it produces gets reviewed, and when it’s wrong you fix the loop, not just the mistake. Judged on what you’ve built and how fast, not where you worked or how polished you are on a call.

Hiring process

  1. Intro call — 30 minutes, both ways.
  2. Technical chat — what you built and how.
  3. Working session — live coding or system design on a real slice, fundamentals without AI.
  4. Paid 7-day intro — real work together, both sides confirm the fit.

Interested? Apply confidentially through Xcede — reach out to Matthew Rees-Davis.

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Matthew Rees-Davis

Matthew Rees-Davis

Specialisms: Software, Software Engineering & Architecture
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