Staff Software Engineer
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Staff Backend Engineer at Pleo responsible for technical ownership of complex business domains, designing, building and evolving scalable, reliable backend services for the enterprise spend management platform. The role is an 80/20 hands-on technical leadership position combining deep engineering work with architectural ownership and influence across teams.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Remote
- Languages
- English
What you'll do
- 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
What we're looking for
- 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
- Strong engineering fundamentals matter more than experience with a particular language
Benefits
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
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 we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work
- Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
- Private health insurance to ensure you're fit in body and mind to do your best work
Apply
About Pleo
The word 'Pleo' actually means 'more than you'd expect'
Pleo builds spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. Over the last 10 years, Pleo has grown to 850+ people from over 100 nationalities serving 40,000+ customers.
Mission
To help all businesses 'go beyond' with spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike.
Key facts
- 850+ people
- Business spend management / fintech
- 40,000+ customers
- 850+ people from over 100 nationalities
- 10 years of success
- Company language is English
- Offices in Lisbon, Copenhagen and London
What they value
- Take pride in uncovering customer needs
- Turn complex problems into simple solutions
- Challenge the way things are done (respectfully)
- Always aim high
- Driven, progressive, and kind