P
Senior Backend Engineer - Payments
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote
Experience
Senior · Not stated
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Senior Backend Engineer on Pleo's Bank Infrastructure team, building and maintaining the payment rails that power money movement, integrating with banks and payment partners to handle inbound and outbound bank transfers reliably at scale.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote
- Languages
- English – fluent
What you'll do
- 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
What we're looking for
- 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)
- 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
- Proven ability to structure complex engineering problems for AI collaboration, including writing precise specifications, validating generated outputs, and iterative development
- A proactive drive to expand your AI fluency as we scale adoption to enhance delivery velocity and maintain high engineering quality across our organisation
- A collaborative mindset and the ability to mentor and upskill teammates
Nice to have
- Awareness of payment compliance and regulatory considerations (e.g. AML, sanctions screening, PSD2)
Your team
Bank Infrastructure
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.
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 holiday + your public holidays
- Hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support
- Paid parental leave
How to get hired
- 1Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background
- 2Coding Interview (Multiple choice)
- 3System Design (whiteboarding session)
- 4Engineering Manager Behavioural Interview
Apply
Direct apply at Pleo
Opens the job posting at Pleo
About Pleo
Go beyond
Pleo builds spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike.
Mission
We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses 'go beyond'.
Key facts
- 850+ people
- Business spend management
- 40,000+ customers
- 850+ people from over 100 nationalities
- 10 years of success
- Company language is English
What they value
- Transparency
- Collaboration
- Engineering excellence