Senior Software Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer | Senior Software Developer | Senior Java Engineer
A London based fintech is building infrastructure for other financial businesses to run on the kind of company that does not need consumers to know its name in order to grow. It is venture backed, has closed two rounds (the most recent earlier this year), is generating real revenue from real customers, and has reached the point in its life where the founders are no longer hiring to fill seats. They are hiring, very deliberately, for the next ten years of the codebase.
The brief, in short is a senior backend engineer to work in Java alongside the CTO and a small group of long tenured engineers. The shape of the work is closer to early stage architecture than late stage maintenance. The expectation is end-to-end ownership of meaningful pieces of the platform, design decisions, trade offs, the lot, with the autonomy that comes with that and the accountability that follows it. Remote working with an office in central London.
Why this one is worth a conversation
Most fintech roles, even at the senior end, come with hidden tax, a layer of product managers who do not write code, a roadmap shaped by the marketing calendar, and a backend that quietly carries the weight of decisions made several rooms away. This role is the opposite of that. The engineering function reports directly to the CTO. The architecture is owned by the people writing it. Tradeoffs are made in conversation, not in tickets.
Background required
- Seven to fifteen years of professional engineering, the majority of it on backend systems in a strongly typed language. Java is the desired working language
- A meaningful stretch inside a financial business of some description a bank, a lender, an exchange, a broker, an insurer, an accounting platform, a treasury operation.
- An ease with ambiguity. The team is small. The roadmap is real but flexible. Engineers who require a fully specified ticket before they can begin will not enjoy themselves here, engineers who like to define the problem first will.
A quick note on tooling
Modern Java on the backend, with jOOQ, JUnit and TestContainers as the working set. The client side is TypeScript and Vue, written conservatively. Postgres is the system of record. Infrastructure runs on AWS with Terraform from the first commit. The stack has been chosen for longevity rather than novelty, which is the right instinct for a financial business and a fair indicator of how the rest of the engineering decisions are being made.
Some context on the company
The company has been operating in stealth mode since founding, present at the right events, quiet in the press. The leadership team is composed of operators rather than first time founders, and the investor base includes names that would be recognisable to anyone who follows European fintech with any seriousness. Headcount is in the low double digits and being grown slowly and deliberately.
If reading this far has provoked even mild curiosity, it is worth a conversation.