Senior Backend Engineer (Data serving)

About the role

About Pleo Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we’re 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 you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering experience building and owning reporting and analytics API services and serving-layer infrastructure.
• A mindset focusing on reliability, latency, and SLOs.
• Experience owning API boundary layers including clean endpoint design, versioning, contract stability, and ensuring downstream consumers are never exposed to raw data sources.
• Strong expertise designing performant read-heavy systems, including relational database optimisation, indexing strategies, materialised views, caching, and API performance tuning.
• Solid database fundamentals (SQL and non-SQL) and strong SQL querying skills, as well as deep expertise in Kafka.
• Deep experience with a JVM-based language (Pleo’s product backend is Kotlin-based).
• AWS or GCP with Kubernetes experience. You must be familiar with configuring, deploying and operating containerised applications in a k8s environment.
• Experience working at the boundary between data systems and product backend services, with a real understanding of the operational differences between the two.