Senior Backend Engineer (Data serving)

As a Senior Backend Engineer in the Data Serving team, you own the boundary between raw product data and its consumers, delivering reliable, low-latency APIs and the serving layer. You build customer-facing infrastructure with strong contract stability and scale, enabling downstream systems to trust data without touching raw sources. You collaborate across data, product, and platform teams to ensure secure, observable, and performant data delivery that powers internal dashboards, AI tools, and customer features. This role offers impact across fintech data platforms at scale.

• Your own Pleo card
• Lunch provided or allowance
• Comprehensive private healthcare
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays
• Hybrid or fully remote options
• Mental health and wellbeing support via MyndUp

• Own and design the Data API boundary with versioned, performant endpoints for internal and customer-facing use
• Optimize read models, indexes, and caching in Postgres and OLAP stores for low-latency queries
• Integrate with Kotlin-based product services to surface correct data for features
• Ensure reliability and performance with monitoring, incident response, and SLOs
• Define contracts with Data Engineers for ingestion/serving compatibility
• Secure APIs with standard auth protocols in collaboration with Authorization team
• Build near-real-time data aggregation across Pleo services
• Design metadata, lineage, governance for explainability and trustworthiness
• Implement access control with row/column-level security and audit trails
• Work with tech stack: AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, dbt, Kafka, Airflow, Python, Kotlin

• Strong backend engineering experience with reporting and analytics API services
• Reliability, latency, and SLO-focused mindset
• Experience owning API boundary layers and ensuring downstream consumers aren’t exposed to raw sources
• Expertise in read-heavy systems design, including DB optimization and caching
• Solid SQL and non-SQL database fundamentals; deep Kafka expertise
• Deep experience with JVM-based languages (Kotlin)
• Experience with AWS or GCP and Kubernetes; containerised deployments
• Experience at the boundary of data systems and product backend services
• Ability to work quickly and independently; hands-on delivery
• Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated environments

• Independent and fast-moving
• Collaborative across cross-functional teams
• Strong ownership and accountability
• Kotlin (JVM)
• PostgreSQL / SQL optimization
• BigQuery