Applications Development Engineer - Python Developer

Location: Bristol (20% onsite)
Duration: 12 month contract
Rate: £82.50ph UMB (Inside IR35)

Role details:

We are looking for an Applications Development Engineer with strong Python development expertise to support the design and delivery of high-performance software systems. This is a contract opportunity based in Bristol, with approximately 20% onsite working.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build and maintain low-latency, high-throughput Python services and APIs
• Profile and tune application performance to meet near real-time requirements
• Diagnose and resolve complex issues across services, containers and Kubernetes workloads
• Contribute to architecture and design decisions, balancing performance, scalability and maintainability
• Containerise applications and manage deployments, configuration and resource tuning on Kubernetes
• Write unit and integration tests and contribute to CI/CD pipelines
• Support root-cause analysis of production incidents across code, infrastructure and distributed systems

Job Requirements:

• Deep experience in Python development, with a track record of producing clean, maintainable and production-grade code
• Strong performance tuning expertise, including profiling CPU, memory and I/O, optimising latency and throughput, and tuning concurrency
• Understanding of concurrency models, memory management and the Global Interpreter Lock's implications for performance
• Solid software design skills, including the development of modular, scalable and testable systems using sound architectural patterns
• Experience developing near real-time systems, including event-driven or streaming architectures using technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or WebSockets
• Experience designing and building REST and/or gRPC APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask or Django
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker, including deploying, scaling and debugging services in clusters
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling, Git-based workflows and Agile software development practices

Desirable Skills:

• Cloud experience across AWS, Azure or GCP, including managed Kubernetes services such as EKS, AKS or GKE
• Experience with performance optimisation using Cython, Rust or C extensions

If you are an experienced Python Developer with expertise in performance optimisation, APIs, Kubernetes and near real-time systems, apply now to support important technology programmes within the defence and security sector.