Staff Software Engineer

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved not just finance. At Pleo were changing that. 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.

The word Pleo actually means more than youd expect and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now were at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40000 customers our business and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs who turn complex problems into simple solutions challenge the way things are done (respectfully) and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward we cant say weve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly thats half the fun! What we can say is that were a driven progressive and importantly a kind bunch of 850 people from over 100 nationalities all committed to delivering the future of business spending together.

As a Staff Backend Engineer youll take technical ownership of complex business domains designing building and evolving scalable reliable backend services for our enterprise spend management platform.

What youll be working on:

• Designing and operating distributed systems event-driven architectures and cloud-native services.

• Applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to model complex business domains and define clear service boundaries.

• Building maintainable systems following Clean Architecture Hexagonal Architecture and similar architectural principles.

• Designing APIs service integrations and reliable asynchronous workflows using technologies such as Temporal.

• Designing secure authentication and authorization solutions applying standards such as OAuth 2.0 OIDC and WebAuthn as well as fine-grained authorization models.

• Ensuring scalability security observability and resilience in production.

• Continuously improving shared libraries project structure development tooling and automated quality assurance practices to promote consistency reusability and maintainability across services.

• Driving architectural decisions evaluating trade-offs and mentoring other engineers.

• Leveraging AI extensively but responsibly including developing guardrails agent harnesses and tooling to maintain engineering quality in a fast-paced environment.

We primarily use with TypeScript but strong engineering fundamentals matter more to us than experience with a particular language. Our technology stack also includes Temporal SpiceDB PostgreSQL Kafka and Redis.

This is a 80/20 hands-on technical leadership role combining deep engineering work with architectural ownership and influence across teams.
Remote but travel to Amsterdam or other offsite meetings in Europe might occasionally be requested

• Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care.

• Communicate clearly listen well and bring people along in decisions.

• Enjoy breaking down complex problems gathering input and driving to a solution.

• Coach others and create space for people to grow.

• Prefer progress over perfection while still caring deeply about quality.

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)

• Lunch is on us - with catering in our Lisbon Copenhagen and London offices or a monthly lunch allowance paid directly together with your salary in other markets

• Private health insurance to ensure youre fit in body and mind to do your best work

• Wellbeing days - fully paid days off designed for a slower pace allowing you to take time to recharge and prioritise self-care

• We provide access to MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and wellbeing support with great success so far

• Access to LinkedIn Learning - acquire new skills stay abreast of industry trends and fuel your personal and professional development continuously

• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that were supportive of families and help you feel that you dont have to compromise your family due to work

• English first. Since its our company language please submit your application in English. Youll be using it a lot if you join us.

• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly we only accept applications through our systemour support team cant pass on calls or emails.

• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply even if you dont tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us.

• Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format email Well design a process that works for you.

• Your data is safe. When you apply we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data read our Privacy Policy here.

• Applying for multiple roles Nothing is stopping you and we assess every role independently. However we do look for alignment so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.

• Reapplying. If youre applying for the same role again please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.

Required Experience:

Staff IC