Staff Software Engineer

Overview

As a Staff Backend Engineer at Pleo, you take technical ownership of complex business domains to design and evolve scalable backend services for our enterprise spend platform. You’ll shape distributed systems, domain models, and secure APIs, working across teams to ensure reliability and performance. This role blends deep engineering with architectural influence in a fast-paced, AI-aware environment. You’ll contribute to a mission-driven company helping 40,000+ customers go beyond expectations.

Pay / Benefits

• Your own Pleo card
• Lunch in Lisbon, Copenhagen, London offices or monthly lunch allowance
• Private health insurance
• Wellbeing days
• MyndUp mental health support
• LinkedIn Learning access and development resources/learning benefits? (explicit) to stay abreast of trends?

Responsibilities

• Design and operate distributed, event-driven backend services and cloud-native components
• Apply Domain-Driven Design to model domains and define service boundaries
• Compose maintainable architectures following Clean/Hexagonal principles
• Design APIs, integrations, and asynchronous workflows (e.g., Temporal)
• Implement secure auth solutions (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, WebAuthn) and fine-grained authorization
• Ensure production systems are scalable, secure, observable, and resilient
• Improve shared libraries, tooling, and QA practices for consistency across services
• Drive architectural decisions, balance trade-offs, and mentor engineers
• Leverage AI responsibly, building guardrails and tooling to maintain quality
• Lead by example, communicate clearly, and help teams progress
• Contribute to architectural influence across teams with a 80/20 hands-on leadership approach
• Utilize Node.js with TypeScript; explore other languages as fundamentals matter more than language
• Engage with Temporal, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, SpiceDB in the stack

Key requirements

• Architectural ownership of complex domains in a backend platform
• Proficiency with Node.js and TypeScript; strong engineering fundamentals
• Experience designing distributed systems, API design, and service boundaries
• Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and architectural patterns (Clean/Hexagonal)
• Experience designing asynchronous workflows (Temporal) and integrations
• Knowledge of secure authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, WebAuthn)
• Focus on scalability, observability, and resilience in production environments
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence cross-team decisions
• Comfort with AI integration in engineering workflows
• Knowledge of the listed tech stack (Temporal, SpiceDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis)
• Remote work flexibility with occasional travel to Amsterdam or EU offsites

• Clear communication
• Mentoring and coaching
• Pragmatism and care for quality
• Node.js with TypeScript
• Temporal
• SpiceDB

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