Staff Backend Engineer
Depop
Staff Backend Engineer
Depop
Peer-to-peer fashion marketplace with commissions
Company Description
Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.
Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.
Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com
We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.
AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.
If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected].
We're looking for a UK-based Staff Backend Engineer to act as a connective force across Depop's Payments and Shipping domains, two of our most interdependent, highest-stakes systems. Over time you'll build a deep, genuine understanding of our stack across both spaces, deep enough to make informed, high-leverage technical decisions. We want someone who builds mastery by working across boundaries, and who'd rather understand how the whole system fits together than own one deep, isolated slice of it. You'll work as the technical right hand to the Director overseeing this space, helping translate strategic intent into cross-team execution, and stepping in wherever the hardest, most cross-cutting problems live.
You should be equally comfortable diving into a squad's architecture for a week to unblock a specific problem, and stepping back to spot a pattern across three different teams that no single squad owns. You'll own and drive technical vision that spans team boundaries, and you'll be judged as much on the connections you make and the alignment you build as on any one system you ship.
Operate across team boundaries rather than being anchored to one squad, going wherever the highest-impact cross-cutting problem is.
Connect the dots between teams working in adjacent parts of the system, surfacing dependencies, duplicated effort, or architectural drift before they become expensive.
Partner directly with the senior leadership as a trusted technical thought partner, helping shape strategy, then translating it into concrete cross-team technical plans.
Lead cross-functional projects that touch multiple squads, product managers, and stakeholders, driving them to delivery even when no single team owns the outcome.
Provide hands-on technical leadership and architectural judgment wherever it's needed most, including writing code yourself when that's the fastest way to unblock a team.
Champion engineering excellence and consistent technical standards across teams that may otherwise diverge.
Mentor and coach engineers across multiple squads, raising the technical bar broadly rather than within a single team.
Identify complex, cross-team technical challenges and bottlenecks, and drive them to resolution.
You'll be an excellent fit if you have:
Experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership role, operating across backend systems at scale. Deep payments or shipping domain expertise going in is not required, but you should be genuinely motivated to build it by working across both.
A track record of working across team boundaries: connecting people, unblocking cross-team initiatives, and driving alignment without formal authority.
Deep expertise designing, building, and operating distributed systems and platforms at scale, in any domain
Strong Familiarity with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka) and the tradeoffs of distributed systems at scale.
Strong judgment on when to go deep versus when to zoom out: you can flex between hands-on delivery and strategic influence.
Excellent communication skills; you can explain technical tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical leaders with equal clarity, and build consensus across teams that don't naturally agree.
A genuine curiosity about systems outside your own — you actively seek out how the pieces fit together rather than staying in your lane.
Additional Information
Health + Mental Wellbeing
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Depop Extras:
Depop is a peer-to-peer online marketplace for fashion where users buy, sell, and discover unique items such as vintage pieces, streetwear, sneakers, and designer pieces. Items are listed by users who set prices and descriptions; buyers purchase through the platform, and Depop earns revenue by taking a commission on each sale. The product works through user-generated listings, a social-feel interface with following and messaging, and a payments process that handles transactions. Depop differentiates itself from competitors by targeting a young, fashion-forward audience with a strong emphasis on sustainability, second-hand items, and community engagement, along with a marketplace that blends social discovery with shopping for both well-known brands and independent designers. Its goal is to grow a global, diverse fashion ecosystem where people can easily buy and sell unique, sustainable clothing items while connecting with others who share interest in fashion.
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