Senior Back End Engineer - Partner Tech in London

The Company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That’s why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it’s needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The team

iwoca partners with a variety of third-party platforms, ranging from large banks and comparison sites to small fintechs that serve SME customers. These partners use iwoca’s Lending API to embed iwoca loans into their own customer journey. Partnerships are an important and fast-growing source of customers for iwoca.

Responsibilities

• Continually improving our Lending API and other developer tools, so that partners can integrate with iwoca quickly and easily.
• Adding new functionality to facilitate deeper integrations and ensure iwoca is the best embedded finance provider on the market.
• Improving the conversion rate of customers who come to us through partners, by streamlining the journey and removing obstacles.

The team is made up of two engineers plus a product manager, working closely with an internal team of commercial stakeholders. Partner Tech is remote/hybrid-friendly, meeting up for team days in the office once or twice a month, but not on a fixed schedule. They work in an Agile fashion with two-week sprints and a daily standup.

The role

You’ll work on challenging projects all over iwoca’s codebase - anywhere there are improvements to be made for partners and partner-referred customers. You’ll be encouraged to bring your own ideas and take responsibility for areas of functionality.

Autonomy

• Own features and projects from scoping and design through to production.
• Collaborate with other engineers to meet the team’s goals, whilst being trusted to define your own solutions and work independently on your part of the problem.
• Design and maintain robust, flexible, and maintainable systems to ensure scalability and fast-paced development.

Impact

• Deliver new functionality critical to onboarding important new partners.
• Optimise the customer experience, leading to measurable improvements.
• Leave code, docs, and processes in better shape than you found them.

Purpose And Product Thinking

• Work on systems that genuinely help businesses get the funding they need.
• Collaborate with our partners and internal stakeholders to design effective solutions.
• Use data to make decisions, uncover insights, and refine strategies.

Essential The requirements

• Experience designing and building scalable back-end systems, ideally in Python with Django.
• Experience working with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL, with an understanding of performance and maintainability considerations.
• Experience building and maintaining APIs that are easy to use, reliable, and well-documented.
• Experience managing projects end to end, from understanding business problems to designing and delivering technical solutions.
• Pragmatism in balancing delivery speed with long-term system health.
• Clear, concise written and verbal communication, focusing on outcomes and impact.

Bonus

• Front-end development experience, particularly with React and Typescript.
• Experience with DevOps practices, including containerisation and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience using data to inform technical decisions or product improvements.

The salary

We expect to pay from £80,000 - £90,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, we prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the professional development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage you to explore new areas of interest to help us innovate and improve our products and services.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work: Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks. Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, football, etc.

The Benefits

• Flexible working hours
• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership
• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents
• 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave
• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years
• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support
• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings
• An employee equity incentive scheme
• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme
• Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse