Technical Lead

Verve is a cashback and rewards platform that connects consumers, brands, and financial partners through a single API. We power loyalty programmes for fintech and banking clients while giving consumers access to cashback offers and gift card rewards directly through the Verve app.

Part of Quantum Financial Holdings Group, we serve three audiences: Consumers earning cashback and rewards on everyday spend; Brands using our platform to drive customer acquisition and retention through targeted incentives; and Strategic Partners (fintechs and banks) who integrate Verve's API to power or enhance their own loyalty propositions.

We closed 2025 with strong growth across our core KPIs and have a significant partnership with a globally-recognised brand launching imminently. As a result, we have created a new permanent role of Technical Lead to ensure Verve’s platform runs smoothly and evolves at pace with the organisation’s strategy and commercial ambition.

The role

We're a small, productive team with a vibrant start-up culture, and we're looking for a seasoned Technical Lead to own the architecture, delivery, and evolution of our cashback rewards platform. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of engineering excellence, product thinking, and scalable fintech infrastructure. You'll lead a cross-functional engineering team, shape the technical roadmap, and ensure the platform stays robust, secure, and performant as we scale.

We're looking for an action-oriented pragmatist, someone with a strong sense of ownership who makes sound decisions with imperfect information and is comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with a start-up. You'll translate technical complexity into business impact, challenge ideas constructively, and build trust through transparency and accountability. Low ego, high standards; resilient under pressure and genuinely invested in building products that deliver real value to users.

Job Specification

Reporting to the Group CTO with a dotted line to the Managing Director, the Technical Lead role will be responsible for:

1. A scalable, resilient cashback/rewards platform capable of handling high-volume transaction flows;
2. A motivated engineering team delivering high-quality features with confidence;
3. Clear architectural direction and well-maintained technical documentation; and
4. Strong collaboration and support of product, data, operational and commercial teams.

Further details on responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the end-to-end technical design of our cashback rewards SaaS platform, defining architecture across microservices, data pipelines, and event-driven components
• Lead design reviews, code quality initiatives, and engineering best practices; ensure platform scalability, reliability, and observability across all services
• Mentor engineers, foster a culture of ownership, and drive continuous improvement whilst championing engineering excellence, documentation, and operational readiness
• Collaborate with product, data, operations, and commercial teams to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and delivery plans, leading sprint planning, estimation, and release management within an Agile/TDD SDLC
• Scope, implement, and maintain software components and modules; manage third-party integrations including Tillo, Truelayer, and Open Banking providers
• Ensure compliance with financial‐grade security, auditability, and data governance

Hands-on Engineering

• Build and maintain core backend services using Python, Django, and PostgreSQL
• Architect and optimise asynchronous workloads using Celery, Flower, and RabbitMQ
• Design and implement secure, high-throughput APIS and data models
• Oversee deployment pipelines and cloud infrastructure on AWS (e.g., ECS/EKS, Lambda, SQS/SNS, RDS, S3, CloudWatch)

Domain Expertise – Cashback & Rewards

• Translate cashback, merchant-funded offers, and rewards logic into scalable technical solutions
• Work closely with product, data, operations and partnerships teams to implement: transaction ingestion and enrichment; reward calculation engines; offer eligibility rules; and settlement and reconciliation workflows.

Required hard and soft skills, experience:

• Demonstrable professional engineering experience building SaaS platforms at scale
• Deep expertise in: Python and Django; PostgreSQL (Schema design, Performance Tuning, Migration); Celery, Flower, RabbitMQ; AWS services (cloud compute, storage, networking, monitoring); and Linux OS, scripting
• Proven experience with Stored Procedures, Common Table Expressions, Window Functions, Partitioning and other advanced RDBMS tasks
• Track record of designing distributed systems and asynchronous architectures
• Strong understanding of secure coding, API design, and cloud-native patterns
• History of leading engineering teams or acting as a senior technical authority, with a proven track record of successful software implementations in Financial Services
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; able to translate complex technical concepts clearly for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• High attention to detail with strong organisational and time-management abilities
• Comfortable working autonomously and collaboratively; proactive, adaptable, and able to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment

Desired skills and experience:

• Background in fintech, payments, card-linked offers, or rewards ecosystems
• Experience with event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI Runners)
• Knowledge of data warehousing or analytics pipelines
• Experience in big data integration / previous work with TBs of data
• BS or MS in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or area of study related to data sciences and data mining or similar

Benefits to include:

• Competitive salary
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Private health insurance
• Hybrid working (Belgravia)

Necessary but slightly less exciting bits:

• Right to work in the UK
• Upon successful application, candidates will undergo a DBS check or equivalent
• Successful completion of a 6-month probationary period
• Adheres to all company policies and procedures

In advance, we apologise as we may not be able to respond to every candidate; however, appreciate your interest.

No recruiters please; CVs will be ignored if they are not from the candidate directly.