Founding Engineer (Platform) in London

You will be one of the first people helping us build Clove from the ground up. Your work will directly shape how our customers interact with their advisors and manage their wealth for the first time in a human, guided, mobile-first way.

What you’ll do:

• Architect and build Clove's core backend systems — focused on reliability, auditability, and scale.
• Integrate with external custody, trading, identity, and KYC systems — wrapping them in clean abstractions.
• Design and implement our internal Book of Record, transaction logic, and compliance-sensitive state transitions.
• Build and maintain APIs used by our mobile app, advisor tools, and internal systems — with clear permissions and observability.
• Define the structure of our internal event system and data models that power advice, execution, and audit history.
• Collaborate closely with product, ops, and advisors to ship systems that are safe, understandable, and performant.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, including time at a fintech, bank, trading platform, or financial infrastructure company.
• Strong understanding of core fintech concepts — ledgers, trades, balances, custody, compliance, and audit trails.
• Deep production experience in at least one backend language (e.g. Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Python) — you’ve built real systems with it and can reason deeply about code quality, testing, and architecture.
• Experience integrating third-party systems via API, and designing wrappers to future-proof against vendor lock-in.
• You write secure, well-tested code and think in terms of system integrity, auditability, and fault‐tolerance.
• Bonus: experience with Postgres, event‐driven systems, background job processing, or workflow orchestration (e.g. Temporal).

Why join now:

• Help define and build the backend foundation of a next‐generation financial institution — from day zero.
• Join a high‐trust, high‐context founding team with deep product and design experience.
• See your work go live quickly — and directly shape the systems that power our users, advisors, and internal team.

What we offer:

• Competitive salary & meaningful equity — real ownership in what we’re building.
• London HQ with flexible working — we believe in time spent together, in person, but we also care about flexibility.
• A‐grade tools & setup — top‐tier hardware and your choice of software.
• Autonomy and impact — you’ll own your work end‐to‐end and help shape our direction from the early days.
• High‐trust, high‐performance culture — small senior team, no micromanagement, fast feedback loops.
• Mission with momentum — we’re closing the advice gap for a new generation, backed by proven founders and real market insight.
• Regular offsites & in‐person time — we make space for connection and collaboration.

Our hiring process isn’t rigid, but our principles are clear: We’ll do what’s needed to build mutual trust: you’ll understand what we expect from you, and we’ll understand what you expect from us. We’ll aim for clarity of the role, though at this stage, some scope will evolve — and that’s part of the excitement. Expect conversations with the founding team and potential collaborators. No hoops for the sake of it — just real conversations, practical exercises if relevant, and space to ask questions.