Lead Software Engineer - Finance and Operations Automations in London

About Abound
We’re redefining consumer lending in the UK, and beyond. Using advanced AI and Open Banking data, we make fair, affordable personal finance available to more people. While traditional lenders rely almost entirely on credit scores, we look at the full financial picture - how much you spend, and what you can afford to repay to build a deeper, more accurate understanding of each customer's unique financial situation. And we've shown it works at scale. We’ve issued over £1.3bn in loans directly to customers while delivering market-leading credit performance - for every 10 defaults the industry expects, we see only 3. We also reached profitability just 2.5 years after launch. Backed by £2bn+ of funding from top-tier investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Deutsche Bank, we’re recognised as one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs (Sifted, CNBC). Now, we’re expanding into new markets and product lines - and we’re looking for ambitious people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and grow with us.

About the Role
We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer to own the engineering function that automates how our Finance and Operations teams work. As Abound scales, the manual workflows that powered us through our first £1bn of lending need to become reliable, observable, automated systems — covering everything from reconciliations and reporting to payments operations, collections workflows, and the day-to-day tooling our internal teams rely on. This is a hybrid engineering and product role. You'll sit close to Finance, Operations, and other business stakeholders, working out where automation moves the needle, shaping the requirements yourself, and then leading the delivery end-to-end. You won't be handed a backlog — you'll build one, defend it, and ship against it. The role combines hands-on engineering, technical leadership, and stakeholder ownership. You'll contribute directly to the codebase while guiding a small team's delivery, mentoring engineers, and maintaining strong engineering practices through code review, testing standards, and pragmatic technical decisions. As the team grows, there is scope for this role to take on formal line management — prior management experience is welcome but not required. We value engineers who take ownership, bring clarity to ambiguous business problems, and care as much about the outcome for the business as the elegance of the code.

Our technology stack:

• Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, OpenTelemetry, Procrastinate)
• PostgreSQL
• Liquibase
• Docker
• AWS

Who you are:

• Strong experience building production systems in Python, including async code, type hints, and a serious approach to testing.
• A product mindset — you measure success by the problem solved, not the ticket closed, and you're comfortable pushing back on requirements that don't make sense.
• Experience working directly with business stakeholders (Finance, Operations, Compliance, or similar) to understand how their function actually works, gather requirements, and translate them into reliable systems.
• Genuine interest in how finance and operations functions run — reconciliations, ledgers, reporting, payment flows, ops workflows — or a strong track record of picking up unfamiliar business domains quickly.
• Strong engineering judgement and the ability to make pragmatic technical trade-offs, especially when building for internal users where reliability and auditability matter more than novelty.
• Experience maintaining business-critical systems and supporting them in production.
• Strong sense of ownership across the full lifecycle: discovery, design, build, deployment, and support.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Comfortable in fast-paced environments where accuracy, reliability, and clear communication are essential.

Nice to have:

• Experience managing or formally line-managing engineers — this role can grow into a management role, but it's not required on day one.
• Prior experience automating finance, accounting, or operations workflows.
• Experience in lending, payments, or financial services more broadly.
• Exposure to data modelling for reporting, audit, or regulatory contexts.

What you'll be doing:

• Partner with Finance and Operations leaders to identify the workflows where automation will have the highest impact, and shape a roadmap you can defend.
• Run discovery directly with stakeholders — sit with the team doing the work, map the process, challenge assumptions, and turn what you learn into clear requirements.
• Design and build Python services that automate finance and operations workflows end-to-end, from data ingestion through to the reports, actions, and exceptions that land with business users.
• Translate business processes into clear technical plans, with the right level of detail for the team to deliver against.
• Lead a small team of engineers, supporting them through code review, pairing, and technical guidance; line management is available as the team grows and as your interests develop.
• Own the full software development lifecycle — design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Provide second-line support during business hours, troubleshooting production issues that affect Finance and Operations users, and feeding what you learn back into the roadmap.
• Help structure the team's delivery process, including sprint planning, sizing, and retrospectives.
• Maintain strong engineering practices — testing standards, observability, and pragmatic technical decisions that balance speed today with maintainability tomorrow.

What we offer:

• Everyone owns a piece of the company — equity.
• Hybrid with 3 days a week in the office.
• 25 days' holiday a year, plus 8 bank holidays.
• 2 paid volunteering days per year.
• One month paid sabbatical after 4 years.
• Employee loan.
• Free gym membership.
• Team wellness budget to be active together — set up a yoga class, a tennis lesson or go bouldering.