Software Engineer (python,Django,Pandas/ Polars)
About this role
Technical Requirements, must-have:
1. Python in production
Idiomatic Python — packages and modules, type hints, exception handling, dependency and virtual-environment management. You can read an unfamiliar codebase and change it safely.
2. Django
Models, migrations, querysets, the admin, middleware, settings across environments. You understand the ORM well enough to know when it will generate a bad query.
3. Django REST Framework
Serializers, viewsets, permissions, authentication, pagination, versioned endpoints, and a clean OpenAPI/Swagger contract.
4. PostgreSQL and SQL
Schema design, migrations, indexing, reading query plans, transaction behaviour, and writing non-trivial SQL by hand. You can tell whether a query will hold up under load.
5. Message queue / task queue
Experience with an asynchronous task or message queue — Celery with Redis or RabbitMQ, RQ, or equivalent. Queues and workers, scheduling, retries with backoff and failure handling, and debugging a job that silently never ran. You know why a task must be safe to execute twice.
6. Redis
Working knowledge as a broker/result backend and cache: keys and expiry, data structures, connection and memory behaviour, and what happens when it fills up or restarts.
7. pandas or polars
Loading and transforming tabular data from CSV, Excel, JSON and Parquet. Comfortable with joins, reshaping, dtypes, null handling, and tracing a bad value from source file to database record.
8. Google Cloud Platform (or an equivalent cloud platform like Azure, AWS)
Cloud Run or equivalent compute, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, and enough IAM literacy to not over-grant. You can deploy, read the logs, and find out why a job failed.
Nice-to-have, not screening criteria — any of these is a plus, none is required:
- Docker and Docker Compose - CI/CD pipelines and multi-environment promotion (dev / pre-prod / prod) - Flask, FastAPI, or another Python web framework - Rust or another systems language - MongoDB or other document stores - pytest, fixtures, mocking external calls - Structured logging, tracing, metrics, and on-call experience - Third-party API integrations: HTTP clients, retries, rate limits, OAuth2 - Django Admin customisation or frontend work - AI-assisted engineering tooling and agent workflows