Backend Engineers (Mid & Senior) - Product Engineering

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to adjustments@depop.com.

Backend Engineering at Depop

At Depop, backend engineers own the services behind how people buy, sell and stay safe on the platform. We’re hiring mid and senior backend engineers across several teams in Product Engineering.

Where you could work

• CX: When something goes wrong after a sale, CX makes sure it’s fixed fast and fairly. The team owns disputes, returns and refunds, auto-cancellation, buyer and seller protections, and the AI-driven support automation behind them.
• Trust Detection: Keeps Depop safe by catching phishing and scams in messages, counterfeit and prohibited listings, and bad actors. A mix of backend engineers and ML scientists working on problems that change as bad actors adapt.
• Search & Retrieval: Powers how buyers find what they’re looking for on Depop. The team is responsible for maintaining, scaling and improving the search system. As well as improving the underlying infrastructure that serves search and recommendations at Depop.
• Shipping: Owns how items get from seller to buyer, building features that make shipping smoother for millions of users.
• Adtech: Builds the systems behind advertising on Depop, helping sellers get their items in front of the right buyers.

What you’ll be doing

• Build and evolve backend services and APIs, from design through to production
• Design solutions for small-to-medium problems and contribute to the design of larger work. In senior roles, you’ll lead those larger designs and help set technical direction
• Own the health of your services: monitoring, alerting, on-call, fixing what breaks and paying down tech debt
• Work in experiment-led squads: define hypotheses and success metrics, run A/B tests and ship behind feature flags
• Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science and ML, and with partner teams when work crosses boundaries
• Take part in code reviews, retros and post-incident reviews, and help teammates get unblocked

Why this role is exciting

• Your work directly shapes whether people trust, find and come back to Depop
• You’ll work in small teams where engineers get real ownership and stay close to user impact
• Many of our teams are using AI and ML in production, with plenty of room to try new things

What we’re looking for

Core requirements

• Solid backend engineering fundamentals and experience delivering production services
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python or TypeScript, and willingness to pick up others
• Experience building secure, reliable APIs, including authentication, error handling and safe retries
• Experience with relational databases and data modelling
• Understanding of event-driven or asynchronous systems (queues, scheduled jobs, workflows)
• Good testing habits at unit and integration level
• Experience with CI/CD and production monitoring, and taking part in on-call

For senior roles, also: leading the design of larger systems, raising the technical bar in your team, and mentoring others.

How you work

• You own problems end to end and set your own direction, rather than waiting for tickets
• You use AI tools in your own work and have a considered view on where they help and where they don’t
• You measure your work by its impact on users, using data to check what’s working
• You explain technical trade-offs in plain terms and ask questions when things are unclear

Helpful experience, but we value learning just as much

• Working with ML scientists to deploy and run models in production
• Search or retrieval engines such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or Vespa
• Trust and safety, fraud, risk or content moderation
• Customer support platforms such as Zendesk, or AI support agents connected to backend systems
• Payments, orders, refunds or shipping domains
• Marketplace or e-commerce experience
• Kafka or other message brokers, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS and infrastructure-as-code

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!

Keep up to date

Want to learn more about life at Depop?
We share life at Depop updates on our LinkedIn page, and you can also keep an eye on all our job opportunities on our careers page.