Founding Platform Engineer

Join us to build the future of financial advice - personal, accessible, and built for today. Financial advice has been too expensive, exclusive, and out of reach for too long. At Clove, we’re combining trusted advisers with technology to close the advice gap and help people make smarter decisions with their money. As one of our first hires, you’ll shape how advice works for today - personal, accessible, and built around real lives. What you’ll do: * Architect and build Clove’s core backend systems — focused on reliability, auditability, and scale. * Integrate with external custody, trading, identity, and KYC systems — wrapping them in clean abstractions. * Design and implement our internal Book of Record, transaction logic, and compliance-sensitive state transitions. * Build and maintain APIs used by our mobile app, advisor tools, and internal systems — with clear permissions and observability. * Define the structure of our internal event system and data models that power advice, execution, and audit history. * Collaborate closely with product, ops, and advisors to ship systems that are safe, understandable, and performant. What we’re looking for: * 5+ years of backend engineering experience, including time at a fintech, bank, trading platform, or financial infrastructure company. * Strong understanding of core fintech concepts — ledgers, trades, balances, custody, compliance, and audit trails. * Deep production experience in at least one backend language (e.g. Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Python) — you’ve built real systems with it and can reason deeply about code quality, testing, and architecture. * Experience integrating third-party systems via API, and designing wrappers to future-proof against vendor lock-in. * You write secure, well-tested code and think in terms of system integrity, auditability, and fault-tolerance. * Bonus: experience with Postgres, event-driven systems, background job processing, or workflow orchestration (e.g. Temporal) Why join now: 1. Help define and build the backend foundation of a next-generation financial institution — from day zero. 2. Join a high-trust, high-context founding team with deep product and design experience. 3. See your work go live quickly — and directly shape the systems that power our users, advisors, and internal team. Our offer A chance to join a small, senior team building Clove from the ground up. You’ll have ownership, flexibility, and real impact - backed by trust, momentum, and a mission that matters. Our process We keep it simple: real conversations with the founding team, practical exercises if useful, and clarity about what we expect from each other. No hoops for the sake of it.

OUR STORY: Every year millions of people are either filing their taxes in fear or giving up on their tax refund altogether. We're working on fixing that. Our intuitive app enables anyone, regardless of education or background, to file their taxes with newfound confidence. Spread across Germany, Spain and the UK, the team at Taxfix Group with its brands Taxfix and Steuerbot, is a compassionate group of solution-finders. We speak our minds openly, and with over 400 professionals, including tax experts, developers, and IT security experts, we're rich in ideas and voices. The group has facilitated more than 3.5 billion euros in tax refunds for its customers since its founding in 2016. YOUR CHALLENGE: Taxfix makes tax filing simple, fast, and accessible for millions of users across Europe. Behind the product sits a data platform that powers everything from business analytics and regulatory reporting to ML and AI-driven product features. We’re growing and the platform needs to grow with us. We are looking for an experienced Data Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the infrastructure and pipelines that make data at Taxfix reliable, compliant, and ready for AI. You will own the systems that move data from operational databases, APIs, and SaaS tools into our analytical environment and make sure that data is correct, timely, and safe to use. Your work will directly enable ML and AI-powered product experiences, self-serve analytics, and regulatory reporting. YOUR TEAM: The Data Platform team is part of the Data Organization, which enables everyone at Taxfix to make data-driven decisions, drive business growth, and power ML and automation in our products. Within our group we have product analysts, analytics engineers, machine learning engineers, and data engineers working across the whole company. The platform team serves many consumers analytics, ML, product, and compliance so you can expect to join cross-functional project teams regularly, working alongside backend and frontend engineers, analysts, ML engineers, product and design. Team members are all data engineers but from different backgrounds. We rely on each other to deliver our best, grow together, share knowledge openly, and invest in personal development through mentoring and innovation. YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES AND DECISIONS: * Contribute to and operate cloud platform infrastructure - manage GCP resources (GCS, Dataflow, Dataproc, k8s, Pub/Sub…), provision and maintain environments with Terraform and help ensure the platform is reliable, predictable, cost-efficient and scalable * Build and maintain ingestion pipelines that capture changes from application databases, APIs, SaaS and deliver clean, analytics-ready tables to our cloud data warehouse * Operate and improve our orchestration layer - scheduling, retries, SLA tracking, and observability for data pipelines * Design data models with proper layering that handle real-world data complexity: out-of-order events, schema evolution, late arrivals, and backfills * Own data quality monitoring - build validation, monitoring, and alerting that catches problems before downstream consumers do * Implement privacy and compliance controls - anonymization, pseudonymization, access policies, and deletion propagation (GDPR right-to-be-forgotten) across raw and derived layers * Prepare data for ML and AI use cases - build governed, privacy-safe datasets and feature pipelines that ML engineers and data scientists can use for model training, evaluation, and production inference * Use AI effectively in engineering workflows - leverage AI-assisted development where it improves delivery quality and speed, and share best practices with the team * Build scalable AI platform capabilities - develop reusable, production-grade patterns for AI workloads (governed data access, privacy-safe telemetry, evaluation datasets, and cost/quality monitoring) that multiple teams can adopt YOUR PROFILE: * 4+ years of experience in Data Engineering or a similar role (backend engineer working on data-intensive systems counts) * Strong Python skills for data pipeline development - you write production code, not just scripts * Strong SQL skills - window functions, CTEs, query optimization are second nature * Experience with event-driven data pipelines - CQRS, event ordering, idempotency, and the difference between initial load and incremental processing * Expert with Airflow - you’ve built DAGs with proper task dependencies, retries, and monitoring * Strong Snowflake or other modern data warehouse knowledge - resource management (compute/warehouse sizing, concurrency), security & governance (roles/RBAC, column/row-level masking), columnar storage & partitioning/clustering concepts, and query performance & cost optimization in production * Cloud platform experience - you’ve worked with GCP (GCS, Dataflow, Dataproc etc) or equivalent AWS/Azure services and understand how to manage cloud resources at scale * Infrastructure-as-code - experience with Terraform, Helm, or similar tools for provisioning and managing cloud environments * K8S and Docker containerization - you package and deploy your own work * Data quality mindset - you profile data, validate assumptions, build checks, and don’t trust that “the data looked clean” * Data for AI readiness - you have experience preparing data for ML and AI use cases with appropriate governance, lineage, and privacy controls * Awareness of data privacy requirements - you can identify PII, understand GDPR, and know how to implement anonymization and deletion across multiple data layers * AI-enabled engineering practices - you actively use AI assistants and code generation tools to accelerate development and deliver, and you share effective practices with the team WHY TAXFIX? * A chance to do meaningful, people-centric work with an international team of passionate professionals. * Holistic well-being with free mental health coaching sessions and yoga. * A monthly allowance to spend on an extensive range of services that you can use and roll over as flexibly as you like. * Employee stock options for all employees because everyone deserves to benefit from the success they help to create. * 30 annual vacation days and flexible working hours. * Work from abroad for up to six weeks every year. Just align with your team, and then enjoy your trip. * Plenty of opportunities to socialise as a team. In addition to internal tech meetups, our international team hosts regular get-togethers - virtually and in person when possible. * Free tax declaration filing, of course, through the Taxfix app - and internal support for all personal tax-related questions. * Have a four-legged friend in your life? We’re happy to have dogs join us in the office. Excited? So are we. Learn more about Team Taxfix on our blog and get a glimpse of our culture.   At Taxfix, we believe that incredible things happen when you have a wealth of perspectives and experiences. We're proudly committed to equal employment and development opportunities no matter your gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, colour, disability, or place of origin. To help mitigate any potential unconscious biases, we ask that you refrain from including your picture, age, or marital status on your CV. Let your experiences speak for themselves.