Software Engineer - Backend

About Pleo

This vacancy is provided by Copenhagen Capacity.

Pleo is one of the hottest and most anticipated European fintech start-ups. We are on a mission to make business spending smooth and joyful by offering smart payment cards for employees.

Pleo is for agile and dynamic organisations, encouraging employees to focus on their professional qualities. Meanwhile, Pleo works in the background to make purchases and financial processes smooth and joyful.

Position

Oh great. Another tech startup is looking for another backend engineer. But is this job post even worth a read-through?

I'd say so. We're not going to tell you all about the company in because that's not who we are, that's why we're working together. Instead, let me start off by telling you about the types of people we are, and the type of person you'd need to be to fit right into our working style and attitude.

In our engineering team, we geek out over great craftsmanship: you'll find our Slack channels littered with latest news articles on backend trends and new resources to test out there. We share upcoming conferences, and then we team up and go to them. We learn a language and then we teach each other. We're always trying to get better at what we do, and so our product is the playground for this. We're always willing and interested in keeping our stack up to date, and to trying out new ways of working.

The other thing is that we love to hire people who bring a different perspective. We're a Nordic company which means we live out a flat hierarchy. This means that we'll listen to an intern's voice as much as an engineering lead's. The most important thing here is that we check our egos at the door, and make sure that work is a happy environment in which to learn. We listen to one another, and we adapt continuously. We're looking for someone who is excited by this - we'd love to have you making your mark on how we build the backend of Pleo. Saying that, we're all pretty opinionated, so you'll have a lot of people to rubber duck with! 

We're also not the type of people who will look down on someone because they ask a fairly straight-forward question. (Ask our poor head of people who writes our product job posts with us!) Because of this we need someone to join us who shares this mindset, and isn't looking to be The Next Ultimate Brogrammer out there.

You'll notice a red thread through this job post: we're not looking for "X amount of years of experience" or adding flashy titles to this job post. You could be a recent graduate with amazing potential, or instead you could be a seasoned backender who just loves what you do. We don't care: we have a mixture of great people with different levels. Our team is getting to the size where we can support both career paths. There are opportunities to manage teams coming up in the year, just as there are other opportunities to be mentored by existing (and future) team members. And if you just want to be the ultimate master of backend, there's room for experts too.

Quite a special part about Pleo is a lot of people in non-technical roles are actually learning code on the side. So if you're up for it a couple of our engineers work with them and give them some coaching on the work they've done (often in exchange for a home-cooked meal!). We've even seen someone go from Customer Success to becoming our Product Analyst which all started over a bowl of pasta and basic SQL cohorts.

So now you're getting an idea of who we are, let's talk about why we're doing it.

We believe in changing the future of work, and that's why our company expensing platform (Pleo) exists. We think that work will change to be more autonomous and flexible. Pleo is an app that delegates company spending to all employees with pre-paid cards: use your card (virtual/ physical), snap a pic of your receipt, and you're done. We take the pain away from employees having to pay out of pocket, and think that if you're going to trust an employee enough to hire them, you might as well trust them enough to spend company money sensibly.

If you say you're future of work, then you really need to live it out in your working culture. This is one of the reasons that our engineering team has been built with a remote-first mindset: we have engineers sitting between EST to CET, across the east coasts of the Americas, Africa, and Europe. As our backend engineer, you could either join us in Copenhagen if you'd like, or sit wherever you want if you fall between our timezones.

Responsibilities

Here we work with people first, then coding comes into play.

Working as a backend engineer means you're all up with devops culture, observability and all its inner quirks of metrics, feature flags and testing in production. We try to innovate with modern infrastructure and technologies, but sometimes the good ol' boring stack also is great.

We are big fans of getting challenged, that involves pushing us around on distributed architecture, finding mitigation plans to working with strange partners like old banking technologies and finding new ways of reviewing code empathically.

You're going to work with designers, product managers, customer success people - and they're going to crave your solutions. You're not just a code monkey, although sometimes we need to code, you're also an architect of happiness and simplicity. We don't want to share a complicated product to our clients, and you will also have a big say in that.

If web services have no secrets for you, Kotlin, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS tickle your mind, come talk to us (applying is actually pretty easy - just share a profile link and write a hello message - no CV needed).

Your qualification

You know your way around

• Server-side languages (we mostly use Kotlin and TypeScript but we know you can learn new languages)
• Cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Heroku, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean)
• ...and micro-services / distributed systems (Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Consul)
• DevOps culture and tools (Travis, Gradle, Terraform)
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Spanner)
• Basic scripting (Bash, Python)

Your colleagues say you

• Work in English with ease (it's our company language)
• Know that Go is more than a board game
• Never stop being curious and love learning about new languages/ frameworks/ working styles
• Are easy to work with
• Would be a person that they would actually like to have a coffee with (virtual or not)

Your mom says that you

• Love knowing how things work
• Probably are an ace at board games
• Take on challenges
• Probably work in IT (moms)

What we offer

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending)
• Ability to work remotely (anywhere between east coast of the Americas to European timezones)......or onsite if you want to (Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid)
• Quarterly trips to somewhere for team camps (both company-wide ones and team-specific ones) 
• The last one was in Northern Ireland last December
• Investment in learning & developing (just check with your team for what's reasonable, we don't have set budgets)

And here are some other nice gestures that we do

• Catered lunch in our HQ and London offices when you're here
• 25 days holidays (annual)
• Loads of weird and wonderful niche communities to join in the company (we're talking guerrilla gardening, liquids tasting, the Pleo band, learning to code initiatives, beer brewing, skiing, that type of thing)
• Wild enthusiasm and encouragement from us if you want to host MeetUps, events, etc - we'll help (venue, food etc)

Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Through fintech we've seen a way to impact how people work; we think company spending should be delegated to all employees and teams, that it should be as automated as possible, and that it should drive a culture of responsible spending. Based on some pretty amazing Series C-round investment in 2021 we think we're onto something big.

So, in a nutshell, that's Pleo. Today we are a 340+ team, from over 48 nations, sitting in our Copenhagen HQ, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, or Montreal offices – and quite a few full-time remotes in 16 other countries! Being HQ'd out of Copenhagen means we're inspired by sensible things like a good work-life balance. If you don't work in the office with us we'll help you get up the best remote setup possible, and will fly you in once a quarter for team camps.

Additional details

Communication and all issues related to the position are curated by Copenhagen Capacity.

Further details on the relocation package are negotiable with the hiring company.