Staff Engineer

Location: London, hybrid, 2 to 3 days a week in the office (Canary Wharf)

The opportunity

Our client is a major UK payments acceptance business being carved out of a large bank to become a standalone company. They're building a new engineering organisation from scratch, with its own software, teams and culture. Product engineering will grow to 100 to 200 engineers across around 12 teams, and only a handful of those hires have been made so far. The people who join now will set the standards everyone after them inherits.

What you'll be doing

• Design, build and ship production software on a cloud-native, decoupled services stack
• Deploy continuously instead of sitting on projects for months
• Shape technical decisions, architecture and build versus buy calls
• Set up engineering standards, rituals and ways of working from day one
• Own what you build: you build it, you run it, you fix it
• For Engineering Leads: build and lead teams, hire engineers and bring structure without adding bureaucracy

What we're looking for

• Engineering experience in a high-growth fintech or tech company (payments experience not required)
• Zero to one experience: you've built a new product, team, platform or function before
• Comfort with ambiguity, incomplete information and changing priorities
• Curiosity about technology beyond your current stack
• Low ego: calm, collaborative and happy to change your mind
• The right to work in the UK (visa sponsorship not available)

Bonus points if you have

• Rust experience, or a strong interest in it
• Kotlin on the back end and TypeScript on the front end
• Leadership experience at scale, for EL2 (leading other leads across a product area)

What's on offer

• Hiring across the full ladder, from Associate to Principal, plus Engineering Lead at two levels
• Your level is calibrated through the process, so you don't pick a grade before applying
• A two-week process from application to offer
• AI tools welcome in the take-home exercise, as long as you can explain every line
• An engineering culture built on automation, simplicity, ownership and transparency

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