Staff Backend Engineer - Data Platform

Company Description

Depop is the community-powered circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover desirable secondhand fashion. With a community of over 35 million users, Depop is on a mission to make fashion circular, redefining fashion consumption. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Manchester, and in 2021 became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy. Find out more at www.depop.com

Our mission is to make fashion circular and 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.

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. For any other non-disability related questions, please reach out to our Talent Partners.

Role

We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer – Data Platform to be a key technical leader within the teams responsible for Depop’s data platform. You’ll drive the technical vision and implementation for our foundational data platform — from experimentation, event ingestion pipelines to our data lake, governance frameworks, and data observability and real-time analytics capabilities.

You will work closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers, backend teams, and product leaders, providing deep technical expertise to ensure our data systems are scalable, secure, observable, and enable innovation across the company.

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders across Product, Data, and Engineering to translate strategic goals into well-architected, scalable platform capabilities.

• Drive the technical design and implementation of core data platform components, providing hands-on coding and architectural leadership.

• Define and evolve the technical roadmap for Depop’s modern data platform, ensuring reliable and scalable analytics.

• Champion engineering excellence, setting high technical standards and advocating for best practices in system design, maintainability, performance, and privacy.

• Lead efforts in data observability, governance, and privacy-by-design principles, ensuring their robust implementation across the organization.

• Mentor and coach engineers, elevating the technical capabilities of the team and fostering a culture of technical excellence.

• Identify and address complex technical challenges and bottlenecks, proposing and implementing effective solutions.
  

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role in data infrastructure or platform at scale, ideally in a consumer or marketplace environment.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems and modern data ecosystems — including extensive experience with Databricks, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Beam and DBT.

• Demonstrated success in designing, building, and operating data platforms at scale, encompassing both batch processing and real-time streaming architectures.

• Expertise in data warehousing concepts, advanced ETL/ELT processes, and analytics engineering best practices.

• Exceptional programming skills, particularly in Python, Scala, or Java, and deep expertise with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Extensive experience working with privacy-sensitive datasets and implementing robust data observability and governance frameworks.

• A strong technical background with a track record of hands-on architecture and development of complex data systems.

• Ability to think strategically and pragmatically: you can define long-term technical strategies and execute rapidly.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; you’re comfortable influencing technical direction and aligning diverse stakeholders across the organization.

Bonus points:

• Experience with machine learning infrastructure or ML Ops practices.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures in a mobile-first product environment.

• Prior work in fashion, marketplaces, or sustainability-driven tech.

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 annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days

• 1 company-wide day off per quarter

• Impact hours: Up to 2 days 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 dependant

• All offices are dog-friendly

• Ability to work abroad for 4 weeks per year in UK tax treaty countries

Family Life:

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees

• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions, and more

• Mentorship and programmes to upskill employees

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)

• Pension matching up to 6% of qualifying earnings

Depop Extras:

• Employees enjoy free shipping on their Depop sales within the UK.

• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!

About Us

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

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.