Tech Lead - Shared Backend Services

TECH LEAD - SHARED BACKEND SERVICES Hybrid in London (UK) or Remote within the UK We’re looking for a Tech Lead to join the Funnel Platform team. You’ll lead the team behind the shared services and frameworks that iwoca’s engineers build on. Those engineers are your customers, and the shared backend services feed iwoca’s lending decisions. The company Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive. The Team Funnel Platform takes its name from iwoca’s customer funnel – a business’s journey from first application to repeat lending. It owns the shared services and frameworks that the customer journey teams along that funnel build on, in the UK and Germany. The team’s aim is to make those services reliable, and simple for other teams to change. The team works across three areas: - Credit data. Looking after the services that bring in data from the UK credit bureaus and Companies House. - Bank data. Looking after the service other teams use to work with business bank transactions. - New shared services. Building services that several teams need, including one for split tests. The team is small – three backend engineers, including you. Infrastructure, such as Kubernetes and cloud hosting, sits with a separate team, so the work here is software. The Role As the Tech Lead in Funnel Platform, you’ll stay hands-on in the code while you lead the team. The team has no product manager, so you’ll decide what it builds, with input on priorities from the leaders of iwoca’s customer journey teams. You’ll report to the head of engineering for the customer journey teams. - Ownership. You’ll be accountable for the team’s existing services and the new ones it builds, from design to production. - Engineering standards. You’ll shape how the team designs and tests the shared services, and review the changes other teams make to them. - Impact. You’ll improve the services iwoca’s customer journey teams depend on, so your work speeds up theirs. - Influence. You’ll use data to persuade the customer journey teams and their leaders to back shared-service work that helps all of them. - Leadership and growth. You’ll line-manage the team’s two engineers, and give them the guidance and context to lead projects of their own. The requirements Essential: - Technical leadership. You’ve led engineers as a tech lead for around two years, while staying hands-on in the code. - Shared services. You’ve built and run backend services or frameworks that other engineering teams use and contribute to. You’ve reviewed their changes and shaped how they use your work. - Backend engineering. You know at least one backend language in depth, and you’ve designed and run distributed systems in production. - Problem finding. You’ve set a team’s priorities without a product manager, talking to the people who use your work to find the real problem before you design a fix. You can show what a technical trade-off costs or saves the business. - AI leverage. You’ve used AI to produce work you couldn’t have delivered without it – such as an internal tool or a migration. You know where it helps keep shared code easy to maintain, and you review what it produces before it goes live. Bonus: - Python and Django. You’ve built production services in Python with Django. - Numerical background. You’re comfortable analysing data and drawing conclusions you can defend. - Experimentation. You’ve built tools that other teams use to run split tests. - Fintech. You’ve worked at a fintech or another financial services business. The salary We expect to pay from £100,000 to £130,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews. The culture At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective. We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them. The offices We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work: - Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks. - Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions. The benefits - Flexible working hours. - Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership. - A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents. - 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave. - A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years. - Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support. - 3% Pension contributions on total earnings. - An employee equity incentive scheme. - Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money. - Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme. - Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield. And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer: - A learning and development budget for everyone. - Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers. - Access to learning platforms like Treehouse. Useful links: - iwoca benefits & policies https://coda.io/@iwocauk/iwoca-benefits-policies-uk - Interview welcome pack https://coda.io/@iwocauk/interview-welcome-pack-tap