Senior Python Backend Engineer – Web Scraping Project
6-month contract | £500 per day | London | Hybrid working
A specialist sports modelling and trading technology business is looking for a Senior Python Backend Engineer to join its platform team on an initial six-month contract.
The role will focus on a business-critical web scraping project designed to expand and improve access to external liquidity providers and real-time market data. You’ll build reliable, low-latency services that collect, process and distribute data from external platforms, including systems that may not provide stable or conventional APIs.
This is a strong opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys technically challenging work involving web scraping, reverse engineering, real-time data, imperfect third-party integrations and production systems where speed, correctness and reliability all matter.
You’ll work within a small, highly capable engineering team and take ownership of services with a direct commercial impact.
What you’ll be doing
- Building and maintaining high-performance web scraping and data collection services using Python and asyncio
- Reverse engineering websites, network requests and third-party platforms to identify reliable methods of accessing real-time data
- Developing low-latency data feeds that integrate with internal trading systems
- Designing resilient services that can respond to changes in external websites and data sources
- Managing challenges such as session handling, authentication, rate limits, retries, timeouts and changing page structures
- Creating stable internal interfaces that shield the wider trading platform from unreliable external systems
- Working with distributed systems, event-driven architecture and high-throughput messaging
- Improving observability using structured logging, latency metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, heartbeats and alerting
- Contributing to architectural decisions and the technical direction of the project
- Supporting engineering quality through code reviews, documentation and knowledge sharing
What we’re looking for
- Strong backend engineering experience using Python
- Commercial experience building web scraping, data extraction or automated data collection systems
- Experience working with asynchronous Python, ideally using asyncio
- An understanding of browser behaviour, HTTP, APIs, authentication, cookies, sessions and network requests
- Experience reverse engineering websites or undocumented third-party integrations
- Knowledge of distributed systems, messaging platforms or event-driven architecture
- A thoughtful approach to reliability, resilience and operational behaviour
- Strong judgement around architecture, maintainability and pragmatic delivery
- Confidence working with business-critical production systems
- Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail
Experience with trading systems, real-time data feeds, low-latency services, browser automation or rapidly changing third-party platforms would be particularly relevant.
Technology environment
The wider technology environment includes:
Python, asyncio, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, LXD Containers, Ansible and OpenTelemetry, alongside modern AI engineering tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.
Contract details
- Initial six-month contract
- £500 per day Outside IR35
- London-based hybrid working
For a Senior Python Backend Engineer who wants to work at the sharp end of real-time trading technology, this is an opportunity to deliver a technically complex web scraping project where performance, reliability and correctness genuinely matter.
