Backend Engineer - CX

Company Description

About the team

When something goes wrong after a sale, the CX squad makes sure it gets fixed fast, visibly and fairly, so a bad first transaction becomes a reason to come back rather than a reason to leave.

We own the systems behind what happens after checkout:

• Disputes and the in-app Dispute Resolution Centre, including self-serve returns and refunds
• Auto-cancellation and the protections that tell buyers and sellers when an order is covered and resolved
• AI-driven support automation and the APIs and integrations that power it
• Internal ops tooling and integrations with our customer support platforms

Our data suggests that problems resolved in-product retain users better than anything that goes through a human agent, so our job is to automate the repeatable cases and leave the hard calls to people.

What you’ll be doing

• Build and evolve the backend services and APIs behind disputes, returns, auto-cancellation and support automation, from design through to production
• Build and test the integrations that let our AI support look up and act on orders, refunds and shipping
• Work with CX Operations to decide where automation should act on its own and when it should hand off to a person
• Design solutions ahead of delivery for small-to-medium problems, and contribute to the design of larger pieces of work in the team
• Own the health of the services you work on: monitoring, alerting, on-call, fixing what breaks and paying down tech debt
• Work in an experiment-led squad: define hypotheses and success metrics, run A/B tests and ship behind feature flags
• Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science and CX Operations, and with partner teams such as Payments and Shipping when work crosses boundaries
• Take part in code reviews, retros and post-incident reviews, and help teammates get unblocked

Why this role is exciting

• Your work directly affects whether a user who had a bad experience stays on Depop
• You’ll help shape AI-driven support in a fast-moving area with plenty of room to try new things
• You’ll join a small team where engineers get real ownership and stay close to the user impact

What we’re looking for

Core requirements

• Solid backend engineering fundamentals and experience delivering production services, mostly on your own
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Scala, Java, Kotlin or Python, and willingness to pick up others (most of our services are Scala)
• Experience building secure, reliable APIs used by external systems, including authentication, error handling and safe retries
• Experience with relational databases and data modelling
• Understanding of event-driven or asynchronous systems (queues, scheduled jobs, workflows)
• Good testing habits at unit and integration level
• Experience with CI/CD and production monitoring, and taking part in on-call

How you work

• You’ll often own problems end to end, in an area where AI tools keep changing, so you’re comfortable setting your own direction and working things out.
• You measure your work by whether it resolves customer issues, using data to check what’s working and what isn’t
• You explain technical trade-offs in plain terms, share context openly and ask questions when things are unclear

Helpful experience, but we value learning just as much

• Customer support platforms such as Zendesk, including their apps, APIs or workflows
• AI support agents or chatbots: configuring their workflows, or connecting them to backend systems through APIs, tools or function calling
• Payments, orders, refunds or shipping domains
• Marketplace or e-commerce experience
• Running experiments and feature flags with tools such as Optimizely
• Kafka or other message brokers, workflow engines, Docker and Kubernetes, AWS and infrastructure-as-code

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees 
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!