Backend Staff Engineer

This is a hybrid role working from home and our offices in either London or Leicester.

Home. There’s no place like it. And there’s no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home. At Dunelm, that’s what we do.

We’re the UK’s number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And the caring and supportive culture we’ve created makes this a place you’ll feel right at home too.

Software Engineering

Our Engineering Department plays a crucial role in driving our company’s growth, and we are committed to providing our team with the latest tools, technologies, and techniques to help them excel and take us to new heights. With our continuous growth, we are seeking talented and ambitious individuals to join our dynamic team and contribute their unique ideas and perspectives. We are an ever-expanding team where every voice counts!

What you’ll be doing

A strategically important role within the Technology team, the Backend Staff Engineer plays a key part in shaping how our systems and services are designed, built, and evolved to support seamless, scalable, and secure digital experiences. This role contributes significantly to the Engineering chapter’s effectiveness and reputation, combining deep technical expertise with hands-on delivery and cross-functional collaboration.

In this position, you will work closely with internal product teams and third-party partners to ensure our backend services are robust, performant, and aligned with the needs of both our customer-facing platforms and internal systems. You’ll contribute to the definition and execution of our engineering strategy, with a particular focus on service architecture, API design, and platform resilience.

As one of the most senior backend specialists within the organisation, the Backend Staff Engineer will act as a hands-on contributor, internal consultant, and technical leader. You’ll help raise the bar for engineering excellence, mentor others, and play a key role in building our internal capability and confidence in delivering high-quality, scalable backend systems.

Ultimately, the Backend Staff Engineer will work in close collaboration with Principal Engineers and other senior stakeholders, actively contributing to the evolution of our platform architecture and engineering practices. This includes playing a key role in defining and executing the strategy and approach for backend engineering within the organisation, ensuring our systems are well-architected, observable, and ready to support future growth.

What this role requires of you:

• Champion the design and evolution of scalable, testable, secure, and reusable backend services that power multichannel experiences across web, mobile, and other platforms.
• Lead the API Guild, driving alignment on API design principles, governance, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Define and uphold consistent API standards, including naming conventions, versioning strategies, and error handling patterns.
• Collaborate to ensure APIs are testable, observable, and resilient, supporting high-quality integrations across internal and external consumers.
• Drive the discoverability and usability of APIs through well-maintained documentation, API catalogues, and developer tooling.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Delivery Leads, Architects, Tech Leads, and Engineers to ensure robust service contracts and seamless integration across channels.
• Own the design and evolution of API interfaces, payload structures, and backing services to support scalable and performant multichannel capabilities.
• Actively introduce and advocate for innovative backend technologies, architectural patterns, and tooling that improve developer experience and system performance.
• Continuously challenge architectural assumptions and legacy constraints to drive forward-thinking, future-proof solutions.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges, and reliability concerns at a strategic level, influencing engineering-wide initiatives.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested backend code, setting a high standard for engineering excellence and operational readiness.
• Contribute to the resolution of Major Incidents, leveraging deep system knowledge to guide root cause analysis and long-term remediation.
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Play a key role in shaping the Engineering Guild’s roadmap, ensuring backend capabilities align with the company’s multichannel and platform strategies.
• Influence and contribute to team outcomes by actively participating in architectural reviews, technical discovery, and cross-functional planning.
• Lead the development of Proof of Concepts/Proof of Value initiatives to validate new backend capabilities and architectural approaches.
• Partner with Technical Leads and Architects to shape the backend North Star architecture, contributing to the long-term technical vision.
• Stay current with emerging trends in backend development, distributed systems, and API design, guiding the chapter on best practices and innovations.

What we’ll look for in you

Essential skills:

• Significant proficiency in backend engineering practices, tools, and their effective implementation in Agile environments, with an emphasis on scalable service design.
• Deep understanding of modern backend architecture principles and patterns, including microservices, event-driven systems, and API-first design.
• Experience with backend technologies commonly used in retail environments, with a strong focus on cloud-native solutions and multichannel service compatibility.
• Proven ability to collaborate with and mentor autonomous, highly skilled engineers across diverse teams, fostering technical growth and alignment.
• Demonstrable ability to communicate and influence effectively within a matrix organisation, ensuring seamless collaboration across product, engineering, and business domains.
• Strong experience working closely with business stakeholders, translating strategic goals into robust technical solutions and constructively challenging requirements where needed.
• Comprehensive understanding of technology trends, with deep expertise in backend specialist areas such as distributed systems, API lifecycle management, and data consistency strategies.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, microservices architecture, serverless technologies (e.g. AWS Lambda), and API gateways, reflecting the essential toolkit for modern backend engineering.
• Expertise in CI/CD practices, infrastructure as code, automated testing, and observability, ensuring high-quality, resilient, and maintainable backend systems.

• Experience working within a multichannel retail or manufacturing environment, with an understanding of backend service needs across web, mobile, and in-store systems.
• Familiarity with distributed systems design patterns, including event-driven architecture, and service orchestration.
• Understanding of caching strategies (e.g. CDN, edge caching and application-level caching) and their impact on backend performance and scalability.
• Experience with GraphQL, including schema design, federation, and performance tuning in backend services.
• Knowledge of backend performance optimisation and monitoring techniques, including profiling, tracing, and observability tooling (e.g. OpenTelemetry and Datadog).
• Awareness of how backend services support frontend performance, particularly through API response times and structured data aggregation.
• Strong grasp of backend security best practices, including secure API design, authentication/authorisation (e.g. OAuth2, JWT), and data protection.
• Awareness of handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII), including data obfuscation, encryption, masking, and compliance with data protection regulations for GDPR.

Behaviours:

Customer First: You should prioritize the customer experience and continuously seek ways to improve it.

Strategic thinking: You should be able to think strategically and see the big picture, aligning technical decisions with business objectives and anticipating future technology trends.

Team Working: You should be a team player and effectively collaborate with colleagues to achieve common goals. You should be able to lead and inspire a team of engineers, creating a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and innovation.

Innovating: You should have a curious and explorative mindset, continuously seeking out new technologies and methodologies that can drive business growth and enhance products, services, and processes.

Make It Happen: You should take accountability for your work and actively identify technical challenges, developing and implementing solutions for teams in a timely and high-quality manner.

Knowledge Advocate: You should drive a culture of collaborative learning by organising workshops and knowledge-sharing sessions. Actively promote information exchange, fostering a collective understanding and expertise within the organisation.

D&I statement