Staff Python Software Engineer in London

About the role

We’re on a mission to make affordable loans available to more people. Using the power of Open Banking, we have built state-of-the-art technology that allows us to look beyond traditional credit scores and offer fairer credit to people ignored by traditional lenders.

We have two parts of our business. On the consumer side, we have Abound. Abound has proven that our approach works at scale, with over £300 million lent to-date. While other lenders only look at your credit score, we use Open Banking to look at the full picture – what you earn, how you spend, and what’s left at the end.

On the B2B side, we have Render. Render is our award-winning software-as-a-service platform that allows Abound to make better, less risky lending decisions. And less risky decisions mean we can offer customers better rates than they can usually find elsewhere. We’re taking Render global so that more companies, from high-street banks to other fintechs, can offer affordable credit to their customers.

We're looking for a highly experienced individual to join us in the role of Staff Engineer. This position requires an enthusiasm for exploring and understanding new business areas.

We maintain a culture of ownership and value engineers that are excited about the business, and are willing to work alongside stakeholders to continually improve business processes and customer experience.

We offer a broad range of opportunities across platform engineering, B2B customer integration, conversion optimisation and business process automation. At Abound, you will work on the best-in-class open-banking decision making platform, and learn how a operate with low-latency, at scale.

Candidates must have had experience working directly with internal stakeholders to establish requirements, designing technical solutions, and owning the end-to-end delivery of complex features, ideally having worked with peers of different levels to complete projects collaboratively.

Our technology stack: Python (including FastAPI, OpenTelemetry, procrastinate, SQLAlchemy, Uvicorn), Postgres, MySQL, Athena, Liquibase, Retool, Docker, AWS

Who you are:

• A professional history in software engineering with a deep knowledge of the technologies in our stack

• Proven experience in making technology decisions, design decisions and fulfilling a technical leadership role

• Strong project delivery experience with a proven history of designing, prioritising and leading a team through the end-to-end process from requirements gathering through to production

• Time management skills to delivery projects to meet deadlines

• Proficiency in writing well-structured async Python code with type hints and unit tests

• Experience maintaining codebases for business-critical systems

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skill with the ability to convey technical topics to a non-technical audience

• Experience in optimizing systems for performance, scalability and reliability

• Proficiency in Git for version control

• A history of building cloud-native solutions with experience working with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure

• Strong SQL skills for efficient data management and retrieval

• Knowledge of lending products and business processes will be a major advantage

What you'll be doing:

• Lead projects that span any part of the lending lifecycle, from finding and onboarding new customers, to helping underwriters asses their affordability, all the way through to actually paying out and then collecting a loan

• Take a lead in identifying and resolving bottlenecks in the current SDLC, spanning QA automation and CI/CD pipeline optimisation

• Work on cost-effective platform scalability of a multi-client system

• Work on all aspects of platform resilience, covering observability and recoverability to maintain SLAs targets

• Participate in the entire SDLC, helping to design changes, review code, build tests, and coordinate deployments

• Own a part of the platform, and be responsible for the smooth operation of associated business processes, and their KPIs.

• Collaborate closely with colleagues in Product and Design as well as users (both internal and external) to understand, challenge, and refine requirements

• Provide second-line support within business hours, helping to troubleshoot and resolve any system issues that impact our customers

• Supporting junior engineers through PRs and pairing

• Apply strong SQL skills to troubleshoot and improve the performance of data management and retrieval across our Postgres databases

What we offer

• Everyone owns a piece of the company - equity

• 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

• Save up to 60% on an electric vehicle through our salary sacrifice scheme with Loveelectric

• Team wellness budget to be active together - set up a yoga class, a tennis lesson or go bouldering