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.