Tech Lead Manager | UK (hybrid + remote)

About Cleo

At Cleo, we’re not just building another fintech app. We’re embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity’s relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper‑intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That’s the future we’re creating. Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast‑growing unicorn with over $300 million in ARR and growing more than 2x year‑over‑year. This isn’t just a job; it’s a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference.

What you’ll be doing:

• Joining a cross‑functional product squad and collaborating with engineers, designers, analysts and other disciplines to build features that improve our users’ financial health.
• Leading a squad of 4‑5 engineers, combining hands‑on technical contribution with line management, coaching and support for individual growth.
• Partnering closely with Product Managers, Staff Engineers and other technical leaders to shape a clear, feasible squad roadmap and deliver against squad OKRs.
• Defining and steering the technical direction for your squad, helping the team make strong trade‑offs around speed, quality, scalability and long‑term maintainability.
• Supporting effective delivery by creating clarity, unblocking progress, and ensuring the squad has healthy rituals and sustainable ways of working.
• Running regular 1:1s, giving clear feedback, and supporting engineers through development, performance conversations and growth planning.
• Staying close to the code and contributing hands‑on to our Ruby on Rails monolith, using tools and practices like testing, observability, AB tests, and feature flags.

About You

You care deeply about improving the financial health of our users and align with our company values and engineering principles. You’re excited by the opportunity to combine hands‑on engineering with people management, and you’ve helped teams deliver effectively while supporting engineers to grow.

We’re Looking For Someone Who Brings:

• Strong experience building backend systems with Ruby on Rails.
• Experience leading technical delivery for a squad or team.
• Experience line managing and coaching engineers through feedback, development and performance conversations.
• Good judgment when balancing delivery, technical quality, and longer‑term investment.
• A collaborative approach and the ability to work closely with product, design and engineering peers.
• A track record of helping teams build healthy habits, improve ways of working, and deliver meaningful outcomes.

Our Tech Stack

Cleo is built as a Ruby on Rails monolith with a single React Native app frontend, utilising TypeScript. We also leverage Python for machine learning services and PostgreSQL for our database, all hosted on AWS. Our CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, with production deployments happening on every merge via Kubernetes. Our backend engineers deploy multiple times a week, and we release our frontend app to Google and Apple for review at least once a week. While we take a pragmatic approach, we place a strong emphasis on quality. Our code is peer‑reviewed, and we maintain automated testing using Minitest and CircleCI. We’re also actively working towards a more modular architecture, focusing on separating concerns to achieve all the benefits of microservices within a monolith, while progressively refactoring our code as we build new features. Everyone in the engineering team contributes to driving our technical strategy, voices & ideas from all levels are valued: we are all owners at Cleo.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with bi‑annual reviews, aligned to our quarterly OKR planning cycles.
• Work at one of the fastest‑growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures.
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility. We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work.
• Company‑wide performance reviews every 6 months.
• Generous pay increases for high‑performing team members.
• Equity top‑ups for team members getting promoted.
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days).
• 6% employer‑matched pension in the UK.
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo.
• Regular socials and activities, online and in‑person.
• Online mental health support via Spill.
• Workplace Nursery Scheme.

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio‑economic backgrounds. If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.