Back-end Developer

About you

You're a seasoned back-end developer who thrives on building smart, scalable systems, especially when they’re part of something meaningful. You enjoy getting stuck into code, solving complex challenges, and seeing your work directly improve user experiences.

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You’re excited by the idea of working at the intersection of games, education, and AI, and you're motivated by the opportunity to shape technology that has a real impact. You’re pragmatic but ambitious, with lots of practical solutions.

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Collaboration is key for you - you enjoy working with developers, designers, and learning experts to create solutions that are not just technically sound, but also engaging and meaningful. You’re someone who sees the bigger picture, balancing innovation with practicality. You believe in purposeful design and building things that make a positive difference.

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About the role

This is a hands-on role where you’ll be architecting and building the backend systems that power everything from adaptive gameplay and AI content generation, to user progression and parental dashboards.

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You'll be key in helping us scale our platform securely, reliably, and in line with the needs of both learners and educators.

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Working closely with game developers and learning designers you’ll:

• Build cloud-hosted APIs and services to support gameplay and personalisation
• Integrate AI tools like Amazon Bedrock to support real-time content generation
• Design secure, privacy-conscious systems that respect children’s data
• Help shape technical direction and infrastructure decisions as we scale

You’ll be joining us at a pivotal stage, working on a project that’s not just innovative, but purposeful. The work you do will directly support children’s language development around the world.

What you'll be doing

• Designing and building robust, scalable backend systems to support educational gameplay
• Developing secure, well-structured APIs to handle player progress, personalisation, and content delivery
• Integrating AI models (via Amazon Bedrock and similar services) to support real-time storytelling and adaptive learning
• Implementing data privacy and security best practices, especially around children’s data
• Participating in architecture decisions and contributing to the long-term technical direction of the platform
• Monitoring, optimising, and improving backend performance across environments and use cases
• Writing clean, maintainable, well-tested code, and encouraging good development practices across the team

What we're looking for

• Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining backend systems in production environments
• Solid programming skills
• Experience working with cloud platforms, preferably AWS, and deploying scalable, secure services
• Familiarity with API designand asynchronous workflows
• A good grasp of data privacy and security best practices, particularly when working with sensitive or regulated data
• A strong interest in or experience with AI/ML integrations (e.g. OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Hugging Face, etc.)
• An appreciation for user-centred design, even when working deep in the backend

About fish in a bottle

Our mission is to make the world better through playable experiences.

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For over twenty years we’ve collaborated with visionary innovators, brands and educators, making us one of the most experienced interactive studios in the world.

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We work with visionaries to create commercial hits, award winners and purposeful products that improve people’s lives.

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We create games, apps and web platforms that educate, train, raise awareness, promote social change and positively impact people’s lives.

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Things to know

The position is open to anyone eligible to work in the UK.

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There is the need to travel from time to time to attend client and company meetings.

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Please consider your ability to travel occasionally when applying for this position.

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• CV
• A brief introduction and tell us a bit about yourself, why you like the sound of the role and fish in bottle.
• Any portfolio work, case studies, or GitHub links.
• Salary expectations.

We carefully review each application, but unfortunately we’re not able to get back to everyone individually. If we’d like to progress with your application we’ll be in touch with you within two weeks.

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No recruitment agencies, please. Direct candidates only.

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Equality

We are committed to promoting equality, valuing diversity and working inclusively, we uphold these principles in our behaviour and working practices. We are therefore committed to promoting equality at every opportunity and our recruitment and employment practices and procedures actively promote equality of opportunity.

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