Lead Engineer

Overview

In this Lead Engineer role at Klarna, you will own and design large-scale systems that move money for millions of users, with a focus on reliability and regulatory compliance. You’ll work across teams in a hands-on capacity, shaping architecture and influencing AI usage in everyday practice. You’ll mentor engineers, raise the technical bar, and ensure architectural decisions align with business value. This role offers cross-domain impact and the chance to push the boundaries of fintech engineering.

Responsibilities

• Make defensible technical decisions and explain trade-offs and rationale
• Align design with overall architecture, failure propagation, and downstream impacts
• Size solutions to business value and know when simple is best
• Design with regulatory constraints (reliability, auditability, controls) in mind
• Mentor engineers and elevate teams across domains
• Set standards for AI usage in production, not just demos
• Lead initiatives across multiple teams despite ambiguous scope

Key requirements

• Built and operated systems with reliability and performance at scale
• Experience in Java, JavaScript, or Python environments (preferred)
• Ability to articulate trade-offs and non-chosen paths
• Ability to explain complex systems to technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfort with ambiguity and cross-team influence without formal authority
• Experience handling incidents and learning from production failures

• leadership without authority
• clear communication
• cross-functional collaboration
• Java
• JavaScript
• Python

…