I've been speaking with Mo Shaygan, who is currently working as a Backend Developer at PAYA, and I came away from our conversation genuinely impressed. Mo has four years of commercial experience in backend development, with a strong focus on SaaS and data analytics environments. He's articulate, technically grounded, and clear about what he's looking for in his next move, which always makes for a productive conversation. He's based in Manchester and is open to either remote or hybrid working arrangements.

In terms of relevant experience, Mo has spent his time at PAYA working across meaningful backend challenges, but the piece of work that stood out to me most was a project he led building an AI-driven NLP pipeline to automate the classification of over 100,000 records. He told me that initiative cut manual effort within the team by around 40%, which is a concrete, measurable outcome that speaks well of both his technical ability and his understanding of the broader business impact his work can have. It's the kind of achievement you don't often see from someone at his level.

On the technical side, Mo works primarily in Python and Django day to day, with solid hands-on experience across FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, and AWS. He's comfortable with the full lifecycle of backend development and has clearly worked in environments where good architecture and clean, maintainable code matter. I'd place him firmly in the mid-level bracket, someone who can work with a degree of independence and contribute meaningfully from the outset, while still having real room to grow in the right team. He seems to thrive in product-led, data-heavy environments, which felt relevant given the nature of this role.

As for motivation, Mo is looking for a step up in terms of the scale and complexity of the problems he's working on. He mentioned that PAYA has been a solid grounding, but he's keen to join a team where he can work on more sophisticated engineering challenges and continue developing his skills at pace. His notice period isn't something we've pinned down yet, so that's worth confirming early in the process, but I don't anticipate it being a barrier. Overall, I think Mo is a strong candidate worth meeting. His technical profile maps well to what you're looking for, and his attitude in conversation suggests he'd be a positive addition to any backend team.