Staff Python Software Engineer

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.

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.

We are thrilled to open up a brand new opportunity on our Platform team. Abound is a fast growing scale‑up. We are here to build something important for millions of customers, not to offer a comfortable average job. Our Platform team is the backbone of our engineering organisation. Right now, it’s a tight‑knit, high‑performing group of four engineers (two Seniors, two Staff), primarily focused on DevOps. I am looking for a Staff‑level Platform Engineer with a deep focus on Python engineering to balance our capabilities, elevate our code standards, and supercharge our developer experience. If you love diving into complex engineering challenges, standardising patterns, and enabling other teams to ship faster, this is the role for you.

What You Will Do

• Drive Cross‑Cutting Impact: Lead cross‑functional projects that create immediate business value. You will add new infrastructure, optimise deployment patterns, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines to deliver an unmatched developer experience company‑wide.
• Optimisation: Design and update infrastructure patterns to meet practical demands around performance, scalability and reliability.
• Set the Engineering Standard: Define and implement standard settings for how we write code across the business. This includes establishing best practices for shared design patterns across all teams.
• Maintain Core Components: Take ownership of dependency maintenance and heavily contribute to our most complex, mission‑critical shared services.
• Enable, Don’t Block: Act as a true team player. You will not hold other teams hostage to rigid central patterns or infrastructure; instead, you will collaborate closely with them to deliver on their needs and unblock their projects.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, OpenTelemetry, Procrastinate), Java
• Cloud: AWS Environment
• Databases: RDS (PostgreSQL & MySQL)

What We Expect From You

• Technical Mastery: Exceptionally strong Python and SQL skills.
• System Design: Deep knowledge of asynchronous development and proven experience dealing with highly concurrent systems.
• Strategic Vision: The ability to balance immediate team needs with long‑term platform health and developer velocity.

How We Work at Abound

To be successful here, our culture needs to energise you. We are not a lender with thousands of pages of operational procedures to follow. Here is how we operate:

• High Bar & Real Ownership: We are a high performing team, and we hire people who raise the bar and take pride in great work. We own outcomes, not tasks. You don’t assume someone else will do it; you follow up until the issue is resolved.
• We Work Hard: We care about impact, not face time. But at key moments, we stay until the job is done. That can mean evenings or occasional weekends, especially around launches or live incidents.
• MVP & Tech Debt Culture: We ship fast, learn from real customers and iterate. Early in a product’s life we optimise for speed to market and learning, not perfect enterprise architecture. We are comfortable amassing and actively managing technical debt through the lifecycle.
• One Team Collaboration: We collaborate deeply and are curious about the whole business, not just our own lane. People routinely help outside their formal role when it moves Abound forward.
• Office‑First: We are hybrid but office first. At least 3 days a week in the office is a minimum. Being together is one of our performance advantages.
• Thrive in Change: Priorities shift as we learn what works. Roles, teams and roadmaps evolve with the business. When there is no rulebook, we expect you to use good judgement for our customers and for Abound.

If you are looking for a highly collaborative environment where your technical decisions will shape the future of a rapid‑growth business, we want you on the team.

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