Senior Backend Engineer

Engineers are the backbone of all we do at Pleo. Without these wildly brilliant people, we don’t have a thing. We are looking for experienced Backend Engineers to join one of our cross-functional product teams. 

As a Senior we trust you to be an expert in server-side languages. Kotlin is 90%+ of our micro-services, so proficiency here is hugely beneficial. Beyond writing excellent, well-tested, maintainable code, you also practice the other aspects of being a strong technical leader. You give insightful PR reviews, are a trusted technical partner to teammates, know when/how to prioritise tech debt, proactively jump into P1/P2 incidents, lead post-mortems and can generally upskill and unblock the team around you.

But it’s not just about being a master of your craft; it’s about ownership and taking the lead on large projects. These could be new product launches, managing tricky migrations, and designing and building new microservices or components.

As a scale-up, we sometimes need to shift focus. When that happens, your role is to be a steady hand to help the team navigate ambiguity and manage technical change.

Mostly, we’re looking for someone others can look up to and learn from. You’ll set the standard for the team, not just with your code but in how you work and the culture you promote. At Pleo, our people and our culture are very important to us, and we value trust and transparency like you wouldn’t believe.

As we continue to grow at Pleo, we're excited to welcome talented Backend Engineers to join us across our various domains, including Platform and Services, Partnerships, SMB, Credit, and more. While the specific team you'll be working with will be decided later, our hiring process remains streamlined and consistent across all roles. This allows us to evaluate your skills and potential, ensuring a great fit for the team you eventually join. No matter which domain you land in, you will be part of a dynamic, collaborative environment where you'll tackle complex challenges, build reusable components, and contribute to shaping the future of our product.

And finally, we want to enjoy what we do and who we are working with because duh.

You know your way around

• Server-side languages (we mostly use Kotlin, with few services in TypeScript)
• Cloud environments/ distributed systems/ microservices (AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes)
• Relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL)
• Testing frameworks (Cypress, JUnit, Testcontainers)
• Observability and monitoring (Datadog)
• DevOps culture and tools (GitHub Actions, Gradle, Terraform)

Your colleagues would say you

• Work in English with ease (it's our company language)
• Never stop being curious and love learning about new languages/ frameworks/ working styles
• Have experience solving complex technical challenges at scale
• Ensure a high bar for quality and reliability within your team
• Coach others to help them develop as engineers
• Advocate for a more thorough code review process than a quick scroll to the bottom of the page and a “LGTM!”
• You don’t just write code; you help to design the overall solution
• Are sought after within your team for help in solving challenging problems
• You’re a force multiplier within your team - your work enables other engineers to do be even better
• Able to raise and describe technical debt faced by your team. And then able to propose a solution or path forward.

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us - with catering in our Lisbon, Copenhagen and London offices or a monthly lunch allowance paid directly together with  your salary in other markets 🍜
• Private health insurance to ensure you’re fit in body and mind to do your best work
• For this team we offer flexibility/remote working options
• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
• We’re trialling MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and wellbeing support with great success so far  ❤️‍🩹
• Access to LinkedIn Learning - acquire new skills, stay abreast of industry trends and fuel your personal and professional development continuously 
• 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 👶

The annual salary for this position varies based on your location:

• Spain/Portugal : 87,000€-93,000€
• United Kingdom : £79,000-£83,000

We’re happy to share more about our approach to pay and this range during your first call with us!

Why join us?

Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Our mission is to help every company go beyond the books. Pleo itself means ‘more than you’d expect’, and it’s been the secret to our success over the last 8 years. So it’s only fitting that we’d pass this philosophy onto our customers to help them make the most of their finances.

We think company spending should be delegated to all employees and teams, that it should be as automated as possible, and that it should drive a culture of responsible spending. Finance teams shouldn’t be siloed from the rest of the organisation – they should work in unity with marketing, sales, IT and everyone else.

Speaking of working in unity, our values tell the story of how we work at Pleo. We have four core values, the first of which is ‘champion the customer’, which means we address real pain points that businesses face. Next up is ‘succeed as a team’, which highlights how our strength lies in our diversity and trust in each other. We also ‘make it happen’ by taking bold decisions and following through to deliver results. Last but not least, we ‘build to scale’, creating lasting solutions that address today’s challenges and anticipate tomorrow’s needs.

So, in a nutshell, that's Pleo. Today we are a 850+ team, from over 100 nations, sitting in our Copenhagen HQ, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Lisbon offices —and quite a few full-time remotes in 35 other countries! Being HQ'd out of Copenhagen means we're inspired by things like a good work-life balance. If you don't work in the office with us, we'll help you set up the best remote setup possible and make sure you still have time to connect with your team.

About your application

• Please submit your application in English; it’s our company language so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join 💕
• We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there! Our lovely support isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone 😊
• We’re on a mission to make everyone feel valued at work. That’s only achievable if our team reflects the diversity of the world around us - and that starts with you, hitting apply, even if you are worried you might not tick all the boxes! We embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply - regardless of race/ethnicity, colour, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic status, culture or beliefs.
• When you submit an application we process your personal data as a data processor. Find out more about how your data is used in the FAQs section at the bottom of our jobs page.