Tech Lead | UK (hybrid + remote) United Kingdom / office

About the company

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.

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.
• 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 3‑annual reviews, aligned to our termly 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.
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
• Company‑wide performance reviews every 4 months.
• Generous pay increases for high‑performing team members.
• Equity top‑ups awarded across all levels in performance reviews.
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days).
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo.
• 6% employer‑matched pension in the UK.
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance.
• Online mental health support via Spill.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Workplace Nursery Scheme.
• Paid for access to multiple AI platforms (ChatGPT, Codex, Claude).
• Access to the latest AI coding models.
• Pick your kit - choose between a Windows or an Apple computer.
• Regular socials and activities, online and in‑person.
• And many more!

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.