Backend Engineer

About Check A Car

Check A Car helps UK drivers and automotive businesses make safer decisions with instant vehicle history reports and AI buyer insights. We turn a UK registration (VRM) into a clear report covering tax status, MOT status/history, stolen and write-off markers, outstanding finance, and mileage consistency (availability varies by vehicle/source). On top of the raw data, we generate plain‑English buyer guidance: what matters, what to verify, and what to do next.

About the Role

We’re seeking a Backend Engineer to build the systems that power our report experience end‑to‑end: turning a VRM into a purchased report, assembling data from multiple sources, and delivering a fast, dependable report view for customers and enterprise partners.

Your work will directly impact user trust: correctness, clear failure modes, auditable decisions, and performance under load. You’ll collaborate with frontend, product, and operations to ship features that improve report quality, speed, and clarity.

This is a great opportunity to shape architecture early, improve reliability and observability, and build backend foundations for AI‑assisted buyer insights and enterprise use cases.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of backend development experience
• Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript
• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases
• Strong fundamentals in API design (REST), auth/authorization, and backwards‑compatible changes
• Experience running production services: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post‑mortems
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and containerization (Docker)
• Comfort working with payments/checkout flows and user‑facing reliability constraints
• Testing mindset (unit/integration), and CI/CD familiarity

Nice to have

• Experience with queues/background jobs, caching, rate limiting, and idempotency
• Experience with Stripe and webhooks
• Experience designing data quality checks and “explainability” around user‑visible flags
• Familiarity with serverless and/or Firebase (if applicable)

What You'll Do

• Build and evolve APIs that power: VRM submission, report creation, report retrieval, and account/report history
• Implement robust data assembly pipelines (fetch, normalize, validate, and persist vehicle/report data)
• Design for correctness and trust: clear status states, retries, idempotency, and auditable logs
• Improve performance (query optimization, caching, background processing) and reliability under load
• Own production quality: observability, monitoring, and fast incident response with meaningful follow‑ups
• Partner with frontend/product to improve report clarity and reduce user confusion/support tickets
• Contribute to technical documentation and architecture decisions

What We Offer

• Competitive salary package
• Hybrid working (3 days in office)
• Modern office in central London
• Learning and development budget
• Pension scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Team lunch every Friday
• Regular social events

Compensation

£55,000 - £75,000

How to Apply

Send us your CV and all relevant project using the button below.