Senior Backend Engineer- SMB
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 an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join one of our cross-functional product teams.
As a Senior Engineer, 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. You would be a good fit for this role if you have also skills for making technical discoveries, making design decisions and improving our processes. 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 as you wouldn’t believe.
What you will do
We need to improve one of the most important areas in the product: email communications. The problem space is big, so we need to create a new team. We’re still finishing the details of the team in the long term, but in the meantime, we have already work to do!
You will be initially onboarded in team Gaia, where you will learn all the tools, ways of working in Pleo, infrastructure, services and a long list of things. Once you feel ready and knowledgeable, we can start moving things to the new team
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)
- Ability to work remotely or onsite if you want to
- Yearly trips to somewhere for team camps (both company-wide ones and team-specific ones)
- Investment in learning & developing (just check with your team for what’s reasonable, we don’t have set budgets)
And here are some other nice gestures that we do
- Sponsored lunch
- 25 days holidays (annual)
- Loads of weird and wonderful niche communities to join in the company (we’re talking guerrilla gardening, liquids tasting, the Pleo band, learning to code initiatives, beer brewing, skiing, that type of thing)
- Wild enthusiasm and encouragement from us if you want to host MeetUps, events, etc - we’ll help (venue, food, etc.)
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.
Got any questions?
Read our FAQApply for this role
We’re looking for new friends, gifted minds, team players, restless talents and passionate problem solvers.
Some more roles for you...
And it doesn’t stop there. Why not have a browse at our other open roles in this department?
How Pleo hires
1
The first call(s)
Let’s get to know each other. We want to find out more about you, your motivations, and give you more information about the role.
2
The challenge
The task is deliberately open-ended and based on something you'll actually work on. There are no right or wrong answers here.
3
The team interview
Expect to share a (virtual) meeting room with two to three people you'll work with regularly if you get the job.
4
The final interview
A call with someone in leadership who’ll walk you through the big picture and chat about how your role will figure into that.
FAQ
This is a big decision for both of us. If you join us, we’ll spend a lot of time together working on some pretty cool things. That's why we've designed a hiring process that allows everyone to make the right choice. Read more about how we hire here.