Staff Back End Engineer - Finance Technology
Hybrid in London / Remote within the UK
The company
Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.
That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.
We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.
The team
The Finance Technology team builds and maintains the payment infrastructure and financial data systems that power iwoca’s growth. The team partners with the Finance team to build scalable tools and supports other product teams to launch new products with enhancements to the payment infrastructure and financial data systems. As a group of skilled back-end engineers, they work closely with a dedicated Tech Lead and Product Manager, using Agile methods to ship code frequently and solve complex problems together. Four of the team work remotely and three are hybrid, working 1-3 days per week in the London office.
The role
Responsibility and Autonomy:
- Lead the delivery of projects involving many stakeholders and systems.
- Go beyond the code to develop a deep expertise in the Finance Technology team’s domain, understand our core financial products and our stakeholder needs to become a trusted technical advisor to the business.
- Perform detailed technical scoping and prototyping to support feasibility testing and decision making.
Delivery and Collaboration
- Architect and implement scalable solutions for complex challenges, such as building payment microservices, implementing direct debits, and rearchitecting our reporting technology
- Translate ambiguous product requirements into clear, actionable technical plans that guide the team’s work.
- Contribute high-quality, production-ready code and foster a collaborative environment by reviewing work, helping to troubleshoot live issues, and writing useful documentation.
Learning and Growth:
- Embrace and demonstrate a growth mindset by sharing new technologies and best practices within the team and across the company.
- Work with the Tech Lead to improve our development and agile practices, and to help raise the technical bar within the team.
AI:
- We're pushing hard on AI-assisted development. Engineers here write clear technical specs, let skills and agents implement boiler-plate, and hold a high bar on code review.
- We give the team unlimited tokens across all models and expect people to experiment.
The culture
At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.
We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.
The offices
We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:
- Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.
- Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.
The salary
We expect to pay from £100,000 to £124,999 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.
The benefits
- Flexible working hours.
- Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
- A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
- 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
- A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
- Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
- 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.
- An employee equity incentive scheme.
- Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
- Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.
- Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.
And to make our people keep learning, we offer:
- A learning and development budget for everyone.
- Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
- Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.
Useful links:
The requirements
Essential:
- Proven experience building and running microservices and distributed systems in production. Comfortable reasoning about durable cross-service communication, transactional correctness, and failure modes at scale.
- Extensive experience with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL, but open to MySQL or similar (e.g., MS SQL, Oracle); emphasis is on data integrity.
- Experienced managing the delivery of complex projects that are implemented by several engineers and leading feature development from 0-1 in a startup, scale-up, or SME environment.
- You use AI (like Cursor, Claude Code or similar) in your daily flow - whether for work or for fun. You use it to blast through boilerplate and research, so you can focus on the hard parts: complex architecture, rigour, and high-stakes decision-making.
- Proven track record of building and managing complex API integrations (e.g., Payments like Stripe/Braintree, or high-scale integrations in industries like Telecoms, Travel, Ad-Tech or similar).
- A strong technical or mathematical foundation, evidenced by a degree in a quantitative field (Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Maths or similar) or equivalent professional experience.
- Track record of mentoring engineers of varying levels as a peer - pairing on hard problems, raising the bar in code review, and unblocking teammates day-to-day
Bonus:
- Extensive experience with Python web frameworks (Django / FastAPI / Flask / Starlette / Ninja).
- A background in high-logic or high-scale fields like Fintech, Gaming, Healthcare Tech, Logistics, Security/Cryptography or similar.
- Working knowledge of modern data tooling - ideally Snowflake and dbt - used to build analytical or reporting pipelines.
