Description
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Bank Infrastructure team at Pleo. This team builds and maintains the payment rails that power Pleo's money movement, integrating with banks and payment partners to handle inbound and outbound bank transfers reliably and at scale.
As a Senior Backend Engineer on Bank Infrastructure, you will:
- Design, build, and maintain integrations with banks and payment partners across multiple payment schemes (SEPA, Faster Payments, SWIFT, and others).
- Own the reliability and correctness of inbound and outbound payment flows, including reconciliation, settlement, and exception handling.
- Architect systems that are resilient to partner outages, network failures, and edge cases inherent in financial messaging.
- Lead initiatives to improve system observability, fault tolerance, and operational excellence across payment rails.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including compliance, finance operations, and product to evolve Pleo's payment capabilities.
- Participate in code reviews, post-mortems, and provide mentorship to other engineers.
- Proactively address technical debt and guide the team through technical challenges and migrations.
You'll thrive in this role if you have:
- Hands-on experience building payment integrations, bank APIs, payment scheme integrations, or financial messaging formats (ISO 20022, SWIFT, SEPA, Faster Payments, or similar).
- Strong understanding of payment flows end-to-end: payment initiation, routing, reconciliation, settlement, and exception/failure handling.
- Experience designing and operating highly available, resilient distributed systems with robust error recovery and observability.
- Expertise in server-side development, ideally Kotlin or Java, with strong experience in microservices and distributed systems.
- Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL), cloud environments (AWS, Kubernetes), and observability tooling (e.g. Grafana).
- Awareness of payment compliance and regulatory considerations (e.g. AML, sanctions screening, PSD2) is a plus.
- Understanding of safeguarding of customer funds and the impact of money movement pipelines.
- Strong problem-solving skills and experience owning production payment systems through incidents and operational complexity.
- High proficiency with AI-enhanced development tools (such as GitHub Copilot or Claude) as integrated partners for system design, documentation, and code generation.
- Willingness to deepen your AI fluency as Pleo scales AI adoption across engineering.
In your first six months at Pleo, you'll:
- Get deep into Pleo's payment rail architecture, understanding how inbound and outbound bank payment flows are built, monitored, and operated.
- Take ownership of meaningful initiatives in the bank integration or payment operations domain and drive them from design to production.
- Build relationships across the engineering organisation, contributing to code reviews and technical discussions beyond your immediate team.
- Grow your expertise in high-reliability, mission-critical financial infrastructure while contributing to Pleo's broader engineering culture.
We offer various benefits, including:
- Your own Pleo card
- Lunch allowance or catered meals
- Comprehensive private healthcare
- 25 days of holiday + public holidays
- Hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- Free mental health and well-being support
- Paid parental leave