Senior Staff Engineer

Who you are

• A track record as a tech lead, owning the outcome of a squad's delivery and the standards it works to
• A track record of leading from the front line: writing design docs, reviewing PRs and ADRs, and solving problems hands-on while setting direction
• The ability to balance hands-on work on the biggest technical challenges with coaching more junior engineers, holding the whole team to a consistent quality and speed bar
• Experience designing a team's ways of working from scratch, balancing speed, quality and resilience
• Experience owning cross-team sequencing and dependencies, and diagnosing throughput problems rather than just reporting them
• Comfort cutting through real ambiguity to set technical direction, and driving technical blockers to resolution rather than just visibility
• Experience with payments systems
• Experience improving cost-to-process or processing efficiency in a high-volume service
• Experience taking a service from a basic first version to something built for scale

What the job involves

• We're hiring a Senior Staff Engineer for our brand new Payments squad, part of Saldo, our Billing and Payments Service
• Payments at tem works today, but it's a basic service
• We're growing fast, and it needs to be built for the scale we're moving towards
• You'll be the first tech lead in a squad that already has a senior engineer and three junior engineers, and you'll own the outcome of the squad's delivery and the standards it works to
• This is a hands-on role
• You'll write design docs, review code, solve the hardest problems alongside the team, and set the technical direction for payments
• The number you'll move is the cost of processing every pound that flows through tem
• Your job is to bring it down, and keep it low as we scale
• In your first 12 months, you might:
• Set the architecture direction that takes payments from a functional service to one built for growth
• Define how the squad works, including the balance between speed, quality and resilience that payments demands
• Lift the quality and speed bar for the whole squad, senior and junior engineers alike
• Drive the technical blockers to delivery to resolution, so the squad's work reaches the people who depend on it
• Make payment accuracy and processing efficiency the levers that bring cost-to-process down
• You'll report into the Service Manager for Saldo
• Own the outcome: Take responsibility for the squad's delivery and the standards it works to, so the team ships work we're proud of
• Lead from the front line: Write specs and design docs, give feedback on ADRs, review pull requests, and solve problems directly through code or workflows
• Set the payments architecture direction: Turn a genuinely ambiguous area into a clear technical strategy, without waiting for someone else to define the problem
• Cut the cost to process: Own payment accuracy and processing efficiency as the direct levers on cost-to-process
• Design how the squad works: Define the squad's operating model and set the pace, rather than waiting for a playbook
• Own the big picture: Manage sequencing and dependencies, diagnose why throughput isn't improving, and make sure the squad's work is visible to stakeholders
• Build a high-performance team: Coach junior engineers while working the hardest problems alongside our senior engineer, and define what good looks like by working the details with the team
• Partner on people decisions: Flag promotion and hiring gaps to your manager, who keeps line management and performance conversations. Decisions on people are made jointly

The application process

• First call with our Talent Team (30 mins)
• Behaviour Interview with the Hiring Manager (60 mins)
• Technical Interview with Martin and/or Pawel (90 mins). You will discuss system design and have a technical Q&A
• Culture-Add Interview with Product and Leadership stakeholders (45 mins)

Benefits

• 25 days holiday
• Day off on your birthday
• Fully remote - expect quarterly meet ups with your team
• Personal office budget £1200 / 1400€ per year
• Paid for company trip twice a year. Previous locations included Barcelona, Budapest and Marrakech.
• Wellbeing allowance of £150 / 170 € per month to spend on your wellbeing
• A generous options (stock) package
• Salary benchmarking twice a year. We aim to pay at the upper percentile (75th percentile) of the market, using London-based benchmarks. One of our core pay principles is “Same work. Same base pay.” This means we use spot rates instead of broad salary bands: everyone doing the same role at the same level earns the same base salary.