Lead Backend Software Engineer, NOQ Events
£80-100k
2-4 days a week in office (Westbourne Park)
Event centric POS & Payments
Be an early applicant
Event centric POS & Payments
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
£80-100k
2-4 days a week in office (Westbourne Park)
21-100 employees
Company mission
Because nothing should stand in the way of enjoying the moment!
Role
Who you are
- You have built and owned production backend services in Node.js with Express and/or NestJS , this is your primary language in every recent role
- You have led a squad of 3–6 engineers with explicit accountability for sprint delivery, PR approvals, and backlog ownership — not just mentoring
- You have owned PostgreSQL in production: schema design, complex queries, live migrations, and indexing
- You have deployed and operated services on AWS EKS (Kubernetes), IAM, S3, and Secrets Manager
- You have been the primary incident responder — diagnosed under pressure, coordinated a fix, and written a postmortem that led to systemic improvement
- You are based in the UK and can work from our London HQ (242 Acklam Road) in a hybrid model. We cannot sponsor visas for this role. This is a permanent, full-time position
Desirable
- NestJS experience — decorators, dependency injection, module architecture, interceptors
- Live database migration experience — schema migration, dual-write patterns, cut-over strategies with zero downtime
- Custom auth / IAM system design — you have thought deeply about identity, device trust, and token lifecycles beyond 'use Auth0'
- WebSocket-based notification or real-time systems in a stateful, multi-replica environment
- Offline-first mobile/POS backend patterns — store-and-forward, conflict resolution, eventual consistency
- Payment or fintech domain experience — Adyen, Stripe, PCI-DSS awareness, webhook security
- Event-driven systems — PostgreSQL-backed task queues, background job reliability, idempotency patterns
- Startup or scale-up environment at Series A or earlier — comfortable with ambiguity and imperfect information
What the job involves
- Lead a squad of developers. Owning planning, capacity, backlog, and delivery predictability
- Write, review, and approve PRs as the technical gatekeeper; enforce quality gates in CI/CD pipelines
- Coach engineers day-to-day through structured 1:1s and code reviews that explain the why, not just the what
- Serve as incident commander for production issues — diagnose, coordinate the fix, and drive systemic improvements via postmortems
- Drive the MongoDB → PostgreSQL migration within your squad in line with the broader architecture strategy
Application process
- CV & application screen
- Intro call with Product Owners — 30 mins, focused on leadership and delivery approach (no technical questions)
- Technical interview — 90 mins: system design on a real NOQ problem + live code review, with Software Architect and a peer Lead Engineer
- Leadership & culture interview with Product Owner — 45 mins on sprint accountability, stakeholder comms, and specific delivery examples
- Reference check + offer — two professional references, offer within 5 working days
Salary benchmarks
Our take
The idea for NOQ Group came from the co-founders experience at music festivals, where long queues for food and drinks meant missing performances. So they set out to solve this common frustration for both attendees and organisers.
The company provides an all-in-one platform designed specifically for even organisers. It automates key processes like tracking sales, commissions and pay outs in real time, replacing slow and error-prone spreadsheets. Alongside this, it brings together point-of-sale systems and stock management so events can run more efficiently and reduce their administrative workload.
NOQ has already gained strong traction, including a £3.4M investment in 2024 and partnerships with major events like Secret Garden Party, Green Man Festival and Brighton Pride. Now the company aims to become a leading global platform for event management, as it continues to expand its features and partnerships.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Sep 2024
$4.7m
SEED
Nov 2022
$1.2m
SEED
Total funding: $6.7m
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
Andrea Diaferio
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding NOQ Group, Andrea spent over 5 years at Kantar in various roles, including Business Partner of the Global Product Division.
Param Kanabar
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding NOQ Group, Param spent nearly 3 years at Kantar as a Senior Commercial Finance Business Partner and CFO. He was also a Commercial Finance Business Partner at Media by Kantar and a Senior Associate at PwC.
Share this job