Staff Backend Engineer

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 [email protected].

In 2025 our ambition is to be a high-performing, delivery-focused organisation and the best engineering organisation for those who value meaningful career growth. 

We are looking for a UK based Staff Backend Engineer to be a key technical leader within the teams responsible for Depop’s Payments and Fulfilment systems, ensuring we provide our users with a best in class payments and shipping experience. You should feel equally at home around a whiteboard with a group of engineers, as you are explaining complex technical topics and why they matter to leadership and non-technical collaborators. You’ll own and drive the technical vision for how we can evolve the architecture, to fundamentally shift our product squads ability to move at speed and drive further innovation & improvements for our users in the space.

You will work closely with multiple product squads, other Staff and Backend engineers, and product & engineering leaders, providing deep technical expertise to ensure our Payment and Fulfilment systems are scalable, secure, observable, and fit for our future growth ambitions.

Responsibilities

• Partner with senior collaborators across Product, Engineering, Finance and Ops to translate strategic goals into well-architected, scalable platform capabilities.

• Drive the technical design and implementation of key Payments and Fulfilment features, providing hands-on coding and architectural leadership.

• Define and evolve the technical roadmap for our Payments and Fulfilment systems, ensuring they’re extensible for Product squads, and simple for engineers to work with.

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

• Lead efforts to evangelise and generate consensus for why the technical work in this area is of high importance.

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

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

Qualifications

You’ll be an excellent fit if you have: 

• Experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role working across the Backend at scale, ideally in a consumer or marketplace environment.

• Deep expertise in designing, building, and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale.

• Exceptional programming skills in Scala, Java, or TypeScript, with deep cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures using Kafka.

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

• Ability to think strategically and pragmatically: you can define long-term technical strategies and implement rapidly, bringing others along with you.

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

• A genuine curiosity about AI and a willingness to explore how it can enhance your day-to-day work

.

Bonus points if:

• You’ve previous experience in Fulfilment or Payments, including integration with vendors such as Stripe, PayPal, or shipping providers.

• Prior work in fashion, marketplaces, fintech, 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 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!