Senior BackEnd Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Playter is a UK-based SME lender providing flexible finance to growing businesses. We combine product-led underwriting, real-time data ingestion, and proprietary risk models to originate and service short-term lending at scale.

In late 2025, Playter was acquired by Shawbrook Bank. This significantly expanded our engineering remit. We are now building and operating product and platform layers supporting both:

• Player-originated lending products
• Shawbrook unsecured SME lending

This includes core servicing systems, risk infrastructure, regulatory reporting, and bank-grade integrations.

We are actively migrating from a traditional CRUD-style architecture to an event-sourced system across core financial domains (accounts, payments, transactions, balances, journal postings). This is a foundational architectural shift and a central part of our 2026 roadmap.

AI is deeply embedded in how we work. We use AI-assisted development tooling extensively, and our product workflows include AI-driven data extraction and understanding layers.

Team & Environment

• Small, high-calibre engineering team
• TypeScript monorepo
• Node.js services
• tRPC API layer
• Postgres + Prisma
• GCP infrastructure
• Strong product-engineer ownership model
• High autonomy, high accountability

Engineers work directly with Risk, Finance, Operations, Sales, and Shawbrook stakeholders.Problems don’t arrive as neatly written tickets. You’ll help define them, pressure test assumptions, and shape the solution before a line of code is written.

We’re not a feature factory. You own things end to end - discovery, design, sequencing, implementation, integration, shipping, and watching it in production. If something breaks, you care. If something feels wrong in the domain model, you fix it.

The expectation is high autonomy with high accountability. Engineers are trusted to make architectural decisions and are equally responsible for the operational consequences of those decisions.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with meaningful hands-on experience in event-sourced systems. We are mid-migration to an event-sourced architecture. This role will play a pivotal part in designing aggregates, defining events, evolving projections, and expanding the event-driven surface area of the platform.

This is not a theoretical or exploratory initiative. It is production-critical and core to how we will operate as a bank-integrated lender.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve event-sourced aggregates across lending domains
• Define event schemas and enforce strong domain boundaries
• Implement reducers, projections, and replay-safe workflows
• Improve event store performance and sequencing strategy
• Ensure financial correctness (idempotency, ordering, consistency)
• Work closely with finance and risk to model real-world financial flows
• Contribute to architectural direction and technical standards

Required Experience

• Strong Node.js and TypeScript
• Good SQL and ORM experience
• Demonstrable experience building or operating event-sourced systems
• Experience designing aggregates, commands, events, and projections
• Strong understanding of concurrency, idempotency, and consistency models
• Comfort working in financial or highly regulated domains

Ideal Experience

• Migration from CRUD to event-sourcing
• Ledger or financial systems
• Designing projection pipelines with global sequencing
• GCP experience