Application Development Engineer - Python

Python Developer – 12 Month Contract – Bristol/ Remote

Build high-performance Python services for near real-time systems
Do you enjoy getting to the root of complex technical problems and making Python applications faster, more scalable and easier to maintain?
We’re looking for an experienced Python Developer to design and build low-latency, high-throughput services and APIs. This is a hands-on role combining software engineering, performance optimisation and production troubleshooting, with the opportunity to contribute to architectural decisions.
If you bring deep Python expertise, a strong understanding of concurrency and practical experience running containerised services on Kubernetes, we’d like to hear from you.

What you’ll be doing
• Build and maintain Python services and APIs that deliver low latency, high throughput and clean, maintainable, production-grade code.
• Optimise application performance through CPU, memory and I/O profiling, latency reduction, throughput improvements and concurrency tuning.
• Solve complex production issues across application code, infrastructure, distributed services, containers and Kubernetes workloads, including root-cause analysis.
• Shape software architecture and design, balancing performance, scalability, testability and long-term maintainability.
• Containerise and deploy applications, managing Kubernetes configuration, scaling and resource tuning.
• Support reliable delivery by writing unit and integration tests and contributing to CI/CD pipelines.

What you’ll bring
• 10+ years of professional Python development experience, with a track record of writing clean, maintainable, production-grade code.
• Proven performance tuning expertise, including profiling CPU, memory and I/O, and improving latency and throughput.
• A strong understanding of concurrency—including asyncio, multiprocessing and threading—alongside memory management and the performance implications of Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL).
• Strong troubleshooting skills across code, infrastructure and distributed systems, including investigating production incidents.
• Solid software design skills, with experience applying architectural patterns to build modular, scalable and testable systems.
• Experience building near real-time, event-driven or streaming systems, using technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or WebSockets.
• Experience designing and building REST and/or gRPC APIs, using frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask or Django.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying, scaling and debugging services in clusters.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and Git-based workflows.
• Experience working in Agile teams.
It would also be great if you have
• Cloud experience with AWS, Azure or GCP, including managed Kubernetes services such as EKS, AKS or GKE.
• Experience optimising performance with Cython, Rust or C extensions.