Period:Initially fixed term contract to 31st March 2025 (or freelance contractor)

Location:Remote or hybrid working

Salary:£38-40k (or comparable contractor rates)

Summary of role 

A rare opportunity to work in an exciting area of geospatial innovation and to build a green-field cloud deployment pipeline. The role is initially advertised for a fixed term contract with the potential for future career development.

We are seeking an enthusiastic backend developer with a range of good interpersonal and transferable skills to enable technical delivery and programme management in a dynamic environment.

Strong database design and Python programming skills are essential, as well as experience of cloud engineering (AWS/Azure). The successful candidate will develop scalable data infrastructure and software for commercial deployment of a tool that is currently being tested, requiring the candidate to work closely with a small research team and wider industry stakeholders. Skills in Docker and container orchestration are desirable, as is experience of geospatial data.

Organisation profile

footflowTM is a startup company that is being developed through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the Oval Partnership and Loughborough University. We are a group of professionals from a range of backgrounds (architecture, mobility planning, data science) with a passion for making great places through people-centric planning. We successfully employ this approach to masterplanning projects and we have developed footflow as a tool to provide a valuable evidence-based contribution to the design and masterplanning of successful places.

Responsibilities

• Create and maintain data models for geospatial databases and develop pipelines to visualise the data.
• Design and build a scalable, secure API for querying street-level data.
• Implement containerization (Docker) and deploy the application on cloud infrastructure.
• Create automated API and unit tests.
• Collaborate with data science pipeline.
• Set up load balancing and caching to optimize API performance.
• Ensure scalability through proper orchestration and monitoring.
• Assist with management of commercial relationships with all data suppliers.
• Report to senior management and specify appropriate software technologies .
• Ensure quality control and internal documentation of all programming activities.
• Collaborate with colleagues working on a platform user interface and developing a streamlined consultancy offer for predictive footfall forecasting. 

Person specification

Requirements

• Hands-on experience of developing software architecture from inception to implementation.
• Qualification in Computer Science or a relevant field.
• Strong experience in building scalable APIs (ideally Python based).
• Experience with containerization (Docker).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure preferred) and scalable infrastructure design.
• Familiarity with handling large data volumes and optimizing API performance.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Experience with databases, especially spatial databases like PostGIS.
• Experience of version control systems (Git)
• Good communication skills with a high standard of spoken and written English
• Clear understanding of the ethical considerations of the work

Desirable

• Knowledge about relevant machine learning algorithms (CART, Generalised Linear Regression)
• Experience in geospatial data analysis
• Strong commercial focus and understanding of the core public and private sector clients in the built environment sector