Senior Backend Engineer (Data serving)

At Pleo, we're changing the way businesses manage their spend. We build solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and effective for finance teams and employees alike.

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Data Serving team, which owns the production-grade boundary between Pleo's raw product data and everyone who consumes it. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will build and own this boundary, including APIs and the low-latency serving layer underneath it.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the Data API boundary: delivering clean, versioned, and performant endpoints for internal dashboards, customer-facing features, and third-party tools.
• Design and optimise the read models, indexes, and caching strategies in Postgres (and future OLAP stores) to guarantee low-latency query performance.
• Build reliable integrations with Pleo's Kotlin-based product backend services.
• Own the reliability and performance of the services you build: monitoring, incident response, and SLOs appropriate to customer-facing infrastructure.
• Partner with Data Engineers to define clean contracts between the ingestion/aggregation layer and the serving DB.
• Partner with the Authorization team to secure APIs using industry-standard authentication and authorization protocols.
• Build a near-real-time data aggregation service to collect and unify data across Pleo services.
• Design metadata, lineage, and governance capabilities that make the serving layer explainable, auditable, and trustworthy.
• Own access control and permission management services, including row and column-level data access with full audit trails.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering experience building and owning reporting and analytics API services and serving-layer infrastructure.
• A mindset focusing on reliability, latency, and SLOs.
• Experience owning API boundary layers including clean endpoint design, versioning, contract stability, and ensuring downstream consumers are never exposed to raw data sources.
• Strong expertise designing performant read-heavy systems, including relational database optimisation, indexing strategies, materialised views, caching, and API performance tuning.
• Solid database fundamentals (SQL and non-SQL) and strong SQL querying skills, as well as deep expertise in Kafka.
• Deep experience with a JVM-based language (Pleo's product backend is Kotlin-based).
• AWS or GCP with Kubernetes experience.
• Experience working at the boundary between data systems and product backend services, with a real understanding of the operational differences between the two.

Benefits

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office
• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis.
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays (additional days may apply in select countries based on local standards).
• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options.
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support.
• Paid parental leave