Senior Python backend developer for NATO

Would you like to join the leading international intergovernmental organization

We are seeking a Senior Back-End Developer to build and maintain robust server-side applications and APIs that power CMRE Data Management Program of Work. Specifically you will work in the design and development of CMRE Data Catalogue Data Domain Model Data Sharing Workflow. You will work within an Agile team under the guidance of the Software Architect translating architectural designs into production-grade code while upholding high standards of quality security and performance.

This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong ownership mind-set and the incumbent is expected to take full responsibility for the features you deliver from technical design through implementation testing and deployment. Moreover the appointee will participate in code reviews mentor junior developers contribute to architectural discussions and proactively flag technical risks or impediments to the team lead and project management.

Essential Qualifications & Experience:

• 7 years in back-end software development

• Back-End Development & Programming

Python: Advanced proficiency; clean idiomatic code; familiarity with the ecosystem (virtual environments packaging type hints async/await)

Frameworks: Production experience with FastAPI famwork and async best practices

OOP & design patterns: Solid object-oriented design skills; familiarity with common design patterns (factory strategy repository dependency injection)

Performance: Profiling caching strategies connection pooling async processing background task queues (Celery Dramatiq or equivalent)

• API Design & Development

RESTful APIs: Resource modelling versioning error handling pagination OpenAPI / Swagger documentation

Data formats: JSON JSON Schema validation; familiarity with serialisation libraries (Pydantic Marshmallow)

Event-driven systems: Message brokers (RabbitMQ RedisQueue Kafka etc.) pub/sub patterns async task processing

• Databases & Data Persistence

Relational databases: Strong SQL skills; experience with PostgreSQL and/or SQL Server; schema design indexing query optimisation migrations

NoSQL databases: Working knowledge of at least one document key-value or search store (MongoDB Redis Elasticsearch)

ORM & data access: Experience with ORMs (SQLAlchemy Django ORM) and understanding

• Containerisation & Linux

Docker: Writing Dockerfiles (multi-stage builds) Docker Compose for local development image optimisation

Kubernetes: Basic understanding of K8s concepts (pods services deployments ConfigMaps) for deploying and debugging applications

Linux: Comfortable with the command line; shell scripting process management file permissions networking basics

• Software Engineering Practices

Testing: TDD unit testing (pytest) integration testing mocking code coverage; awareness of contract testing

CI/CD: Building and maintaining pipelines (GitHub Actions GitLab CI Azure DevOps or equivalent); automated linting testing and deployment

Version control: Advanced Git usage branching strategies (GitFlow trunk-based) pull/merge requests rebasing conflict resolution

Code quality: Static analysis linting (Ruff flake8 mypy) code review best practices documentation (docstrings ADRs)

• Security

Secure coding: OWASP Top 10 awareness input validation output encoding secrets management

Authentication & authorisation: OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect JWT; experience integrating with identity providers (Keycloak Entra ID or equivalent)

API security: Rate limiting CORS TLS API key management

• Architecture Awareness & Collaboration

Architecture literacy: Ability to read and contribute to architectural documentation (C4 UML); understanding of microservices event-driven and layered patterns

Agile: Active participation in sprint ceremonies backlog refinement estimation and retrospectives

Communication: Clear reporting of progress and blockers; collaboration with architects front-end developers QA DevOps and UX designers

English proficiency: Excellent written and spoken English in a professional/international context

If youve read the description and feel this role is a great match wed love to hear from you! Click Apply for this job to be directed to a brief questionnaire. It should only take a few moments to complete and well be in touch promptly if your experience aligns with our needs.