Staff Engineer - Credit in London

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’. The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.

At Pleo, we’re on a mission to make spend management surprisingly effective and empowering. We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Credit team. You will help set technical direction and deliver resilient backend systems that power Pleo’s credit products—owning critical flows across the credit account lifecycle, charging, eligibility and underwriting, and collections, with a high bar for correctness and reliability.

What Credit Team Does

• Credit helps companies access and manage credit in Pleo in a safe, scalable way.
• Credit product infrastructure: build the backend foundations that power Pleo’s credit products (e.g., overdraft).
• Credit account lifecycle: credit activation, billing, renewals/closures, and accurate credit state management.
• Charging & collections: implement interest/fees, repayment flows, and collections workflows with strong controls and auditability.
• Eligibility & underwriting: build and evolve the eligibility and underwriting flows that decide when customers can access credit, in line with our risk policy.
• Integrations & dependencies: work closely with other teams to deliver end-to-end credit flows with correctness and reliability.

What You’ll Be Doing

• In this role, you will be a force multiplier for backend delivery and technical strategy.
• Drive initiatives to design, build, and maintain scalable backend services (we primarily use Kotlin).
• Own and evolve service architecture, APIs, and data models in a financial domain with a high bar for correctness.
• Build and maintain integrations that enable credit capabilities, and continuously improve reliability and how we run systems in production.
• Collaborate across teams to deliver end-to-end outcomes, and lead the technical part of cross-team initiatives.
• Set technical direction for key parts of the backend.
• Analyse system performance and implement improvements to ensure high reliability and scalability.
• Raise our engineering bar for correctness through strong engineering practices:
• Code reviews, incident follow-ups and post-mortems, and thoughtful ownership.
• Safe change management (backwards compatibility, feature flags, migrations, rollout plans).
• Resilient workflows (idempotency, reconciliation, safe retries).
• Proactively identify and reduce technical debt and help guide the team through technical challenges and migrations.
• Support other engineers through pairing, reviews, and technical guidance.
• Contribute hands-on in code. You should expect to be coding a meaningful part of the time.

You’ll Bring Solid Experience With

• Designing and maintaining backend systems, ideally in domains with strong requirements for correctness and reliability.
• Observability and owning systems in production (monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-mortems).
• Distributed systems fundamentals (async workflows, consistency, idempotency, and designing for things going wrong in production).
• API design, clear service boundaries, and integrating with external systems in a maintainable way.
• Data modelling and evolving schemas safely over time.
• Strong testing practices and a high quality mindset.
• Clear communication and pragmatic decision-making across teams and stakeholders.

Your colleagues would say you

• Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care.
• Communicate clearly, listen well, and bring people along in decisions.
• Enjoy breaking down complex problems, gathering input, and driving to a solution.
• Coach and mentor others and create space for people to grow.
• Prefer progress over perfection, while still caring deeply about quality.

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!).
• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office.
• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis.
• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays.
• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options.
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far.
• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work.