About the role
We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join the Partner Flow team. This role is a chance to shape how thousands of small businesses find their way to iwoca. You'll join the team that owns iwoca's partner integrations — the Lending API and embedded flows that let third-party platforms, from major banks to fintechs, offer iwoca loans inside their own customer journeys. You'll own projects, collaborate with stakeholders, and design robust systems to deliver important functionality and measurably improve the experience for our partners and customers.
About 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. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.
Team Responsibilities
- Continually improving our Lending API and other developer tools, so that partners can integrate with iwoca quickly and easily.
- Adding new functionality to facilitate deeper integrations and ensure iwoca is the best embedded finance provider on the market.
- Improving the conversion rate of customers who come to us through partners - streamlining the journey, running RCTs (randomised control trials) and building models alongside our embedded data scientist to find what works.
Role Expectations
- Autonomy: Own features and projects from scoping and design through to production. Collaborate with other engineers to meet the team’s goals, whilst being trusted to define your own solutions and work independently on your part of the problem. Design and maintain robust, flexible, and maintainable systems to ensure scalability and fast-paced development.
- Impact: Deliver new functionality critical to onboarding important new partners. Run experiments (RCTs) and optimise the funnel to measurably improve how partner-referred customers convert. Leave code, docs, and processes in better shape than you found them.
- Purpose and product thinking: Work on systems that genuinely help businesses get the funding they need. Collaborate with our partners and internal stakeholders to design effective solutions. Use data to make decisions, uncover insights, and refine strategies.
- 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 — the person, not the model, is accountable for what merges. We expect AI output to be validated for correctness, performance and security like any other change. We give the team unlimited tokens across all models and expect people to experiment.
Salary
We expect to pay from £60,000—£85,000 for this role. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.
Benefits
- Flexible working hours.
- Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
- A choice between a dedicated dental plan or a health cash plan that reimburses everyday medical expenses.
- A private GP service 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.
Learning and Development
- A learning and development budget for everyone.
- Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
- Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.
Culture and Environment
- 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.
- We prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage people to explore new areas of interest, adopt better tools – including AI – and apply sound judgement.
Essential
- Experience designing and building scalable back-end systems, ideally in Python.
- Experience working with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL, with an understanding of performance and maintainability considerations.
- Experience building and maintaining APIs that are easy to use, reliable, and well-documented.
- Experience managing projects end to end, from understanding business problems to designing and delivering technical solutions.
- Pragmatism in balancing delivery speed with long-term system health.
- Clear, concise written and verbal communication, focusing on outcomes and impact.
- A genuine team player: you support your teammates, share knowledge, and care about the team's success as much as your own.
- AI fluency. Experience using AI coding tools to accelerate real delivery, and a genuine interest in getting better at it - with a pragmatic sense of where it adds value and where it doesn't.
Bonus
- Front-end development experience, particularly with React and Typescript.
- Experience with DevOps practices, including containerisation and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with experimentation (e.g. A/B tests or RCTs) or using data to drive product decisions.
- Working knowledge of modern data tooling - ideally Snowflake and dbt - used to build analytical or reporting pipelines.
