Back End Engineer

About the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)

Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose company. It exists to improve people’s lives and communities. It works in partnership with national, regional and local governments, businesses, foundations and charities, to tackle major policy problems, often through testing and implementing simple yet powerful changes.

It has about 200 staff based in 8 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific, and has run more than 2000 projects to date, including over 1000 randomised controlled trials in over 100 countries. In addition to its own interventions, it openly shares expertise and helps others build capacity and skills to apply behavioural science for social good.

Job Information:

Available on a full time or part-time basis (39 hours or 32 hours per week/ 4-5 days)

Flexible working options include flexible start and finish times and some home working.

Starting salary: between £40,000 and £54,000 per annum FTE (depending on experience and office location), plus benefits and bonus.

This role is Remote but must be based in the UK (we have offices in both London and Manchester).

Are you looking for a new challenge and want to join a successful and rapidly growing organisation? Do you have a passion for enabling people to perform at their best? If so, we want to hear from you.

What does a back-end engineer at BIT do?

We are looking for a Back-End Engineer to join the Product team at BIT. In this role, you will work alongside our Group Product Lead and Full-Stack Developer to maintain and develop BIT’s flagship online research platform, Predictiv, while helping the organisation leverage technology to support its impactful client work.

This is a varied backend role that balances traditional web application development with hands-on data engineering. We use Ruby on Rails for web app development, with AWS cloud infrastructure and modern CI/CD tooling; Python-based data engineering (including tools like FastAPI and Streamlit).

You will spend most of your time building robust features for Predictiv, alongside managing our data warehouse and pipelines. Alongside working on Predictiv, we expect this role will have opportunities to support on certain client projects - recent examples include analysing large-scale text datasets and building data pipelines to support automated client data sharing. Overall we are a small team in a fast paced environment, so the successful candidate will be adaptable and delivery focussed.

A back-end engineer at BIT will:

• Maintains and develops Predictiv, BIT's flagship online research platform, including how data flows through the platform; platform performance at scale; integrations with third party services, including via APIs.
• Embeds security considerations into platform and infrastructure design.
• Establishes and maintains automated testing to support reliable delivery.
• Resolves technical support tickets — diagnosing bugs, answering codebase questions, and scoping new features.
• Helps prioritise and deliver against the Predictiv product roadmap
• Maintains BIT's Python-based data engineering infrastructure, including a data warehouse and pipelines
• Supports technical delivery on client projects, such as large-scale data analysis and automated reporting pipelines
• Advises project teams on technical feasibility and approach when scoping bids
• Contributes to the team's growing practice in applying AI to existing workflows.

What makes a great back-end engineer at BIT?

• Experience building and releasing digital products or features, working in small teams or independently, using multiple languages and frameworks. This should include a track record of backend work within full-stack frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django, as well as comfort with core web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• You can identify, locate and fix faults, and manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets.
• You understand information security, and can design solutions and services with security controls embedded — engineered specifically to mitigate security threats as a core feature.
• You have a track record of designing and delivering the simplest working solution, keeping architecture and technology choices proportionate to the maturity of the product and brief.
• You can integrate different technologies, balancing tried-and-tested with cutting-edge approaches to deliver anything from scrappy proofs of concept to robust products, and establish appropriate levels of automated testing to support this.
• Familiarity with version control tools such as Git/GitHub.
• Uses AI development tools effectively, with the judgement to review, test and correct AI-generated code.

In addition, we are particularly interested to hear from candidates who have:

• Experience with SQL and Python-based data pipeline/orchestration tools, ideally including hands-on experience with a modern orchestration framework.
• Comfort building Python-based tools or services (e.g. with FastAPI, Streamlit) to support internal or client-facing data products.
• You have experience presenting technical concepts and collaborating effectively to deliver valuable software products in a non-technical environment.
• An understanding of DevOps concepts such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, or MLOps.

Who are we and what can we offer you?

The Behavioural Insights Team is the world leader in applying behavioural science to public policy challenges in order to strengthen communities and improve lives.

We design and rigorously test new ideas across a range of areas such as health, crime and education, to establish what works and what doesn’t. We have helped Tuberculosis patients take their medicine; reduced police susceptibility to cyberattacks; and helped organisations close their gender pay gap.

BIT really is a great place to work:

• Bonus scheme
• Generous pension scheme with 7% employer contribution
• A flexible benefit pot of £1,100 to spend on our flexible benefits programme which currently includes things like the ability to buy extra annual leave at the start of the year, gym membership, cycle to work scheme etc or just take as cash.
• 25 days of annual leave (in addition to public holidays) for full-time employees, rising to 27 days after 2 years continuous service
• We offer enhanced parental leave payments
• We encourage flexible working and have a culture which enables this; for example flexible start and finish times and an IT set up which allows for easy working from home options
• We have regular team lunches with inspirational guest speakers.
• We’re a social bunch and have a variety of interest groups including Film Club, BIT Kids for our parents & 5-a-side team to name a few.
• We have a great office, which has a fabulous roof terrace overlooking the Thames river, an amazing coffee machine and fridges stocked full of soft drinks!

This role is open from 3rd November 2026 to 17th November 2026 at midday (BST).

Please note

You will need to have the right to work in order to be able to undertake this role. We will ask all applicants short-listed for an interview to provide evidence of their right to work during the recruitment process. If you do not have the right to work for BIT but are the most suitable person for the role we will explore with you whether sponsorship may be an option. However, this may not be possible for all roles.

Some of the personal data you provide to Greenhouse when you apply for a role with The Behavioural Insights Team will be passed on to The Behavioural Insights Team for the purposes of (a) reviewing your application; (b) inviting you for interview; and/or (c) offering you a job and getting you set up as an employee/contractor. For full details on how BIT collects and uses your personal data please visit our website - https://www.bi.team/bit-global-recruitment-privacy-notice/

If your application is not successful, any personal data provided to us by Greenhouse (including any personal data relating to equal opportunities monitoring as set out above) will be retained by The Behavioural Insights Team for no longer than 6 months after the application deadline has passed (other than in exceptional circumstances where we may need to retain your personal data for longer), at which point your personal data will be securely deleted. We only keep your information for that period in order to allow us to comply with relevant legal obligations.