Senior Software Engineer I

Thought Machine

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. At Thought Machine, our Senior Software Engineers specialised in Infrastructure play a crucial role in deploying and maintaining our cutting-edge software, developing tools and integrations with third-party infrastructure components used in our customers’ environments. Our team's mission is to abstract away multi-cloud complexity and reduce cognitive load for other developers. We treat our platform infrastructure which spans, orchestration, observability, and data. As a first-class product, enabling our internal teams and global clients to operate securely and reliably at massive scale. Duties * Scale the Core Platform: Evolve, scale, and optimise the cloud-agnostic platform infrastructure powering Vault globally. * Simplify Orchestration: Build intuitive control planes and automation to further abstract away infrastructure complexity, significantly easing the cognitive load for Thought Machine engineers and bank SREs. * Design for Resiliency: Engineer robust, fault-tolerant architectures and Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning (DR/BCP) systems. * Advance Observability: Enhance our comprehensive observability suites that are shared across the entire Thought Machine product ecosystem, providing clients with deep, out-of-the-box monitoring and insights * Optimise Data & Streaming: Scale and optimise core databases and event-streaming platforms to achieve maximum performance and scalability at the lowest cost Essential * Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a similar technical field. * 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling infrastructure platforms (not just maintaining them). * Strong proficiency in building production-ready platform tooling using Python or Golang. * Deep understanding of container and orchestration internals (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). * Hands-on experience extending and integrating open-source tools like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana. * Proven ability to package and scale developer-facing infrastructure utilities with a focus on improving system reliability. Desirable * Experience building cloud-agnostic solutions running across AWS, Azure, and GCP. * Technical depth in databases or event-streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, DuckDB). * A deep interest in the internals of infrastructure tools, with a track record of troubleshooting, extending, or optimizing them within a professional environment. Benefits * Highly competitive salary and commission * Pension plan (match up to 5%) * Life insurance (3x annual salary) * Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) * Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) * 25 days holiday and bank holidays * Flexible working hours * Cycle-to-work scheme * Electric car scheme * Season ticket loan * Access to outstanding learning materials and courses * Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine * All the latest tech you need * Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals * Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks * A talented and experienced team as your colleagues * An environment where we encourage learning and progress * Two charity days a year * Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.

Thought Machine

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. As a Senior Software Engineer II, you operate with a wide sphere of influence. You will own complex, highly ambiguous technical challenges end-to-end, handling unexpected hurdles independently and gracefully. Your role goes beyond individual team delivery; you will drive systemic, organizational change and shape the long-term technical direction of our platforms. You will actively drive our engineering and company principles by aligning with our broader codebase, architecture, objectives, and goals, while acting as a crucial link between senior leadership, external stakeholders, and engineering teams. WHAT YOU’LL DO Technical Leadership * Design & Build: Create solutions to highly complex problems, utilising a deep understanding of the codebase and architecture, and lead the direction for future technical change. * Architecture & Standards: Utilise expertise to enable solutions to meet security, performance, cost, reliability, maintainability, and scalability requirements in a repeatable way and beyond existing capabilities, shaping the overall technical direction. Take part in defining standards and engineering practices for the entire company. Drive adoption of latest technologies, such as AI-tools, to scale developer velocity and code quality, keeping Thought Machine always ahead of the curve. * Technical Direction: Keep a pulse on industry-leading software trends and best practices, introducing new tools and processes that shape Thought Machine's technical roadmap. * Code Quality & Peer Review: Provide technical leadership and guidance to support others, ensuring their work items consider broader impact, long-term outcomes, and strategic direction end-to-end. * Operational Excellence: Investigate complex issues spanning across services in non-local or production environments (including across environments, clusters, and products), and possess a deep understanding to drive improvements to operational and production support processes. * Hiring: Lead technical interviews to actively evaluate the capability of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and leadership roles.. Product & Delivery * End-to-End Ownership: Own the solution to work items of undefined scope and high complexity end-to-end, handling unexpected complexity gracefully and independently. Drive delivery requiring effective and timely stakeholder management across larger milestones, which can potentially span multiple units or departments. * Product Vision: Utilise a deep understanding of the product to envision and contribute to future solutions, plans, and approaches. Drive the direction and actively contribute to the product strategy, vision, and long-term roadmap. Collaboration & Mentorship * Strategic Communication: Communicate seamlessly with stakeholders at all levels, managing leadership expectations while preserving the agility and focus of engineering teams. Build consensus, and enable solutions to complex, changing requirements * Team Growth: Inspire and empower others by example and through your guidance, knowledge sharing, and idea creation. Understand the capabilities and expertise of others to enable effective delegation and personal growth. Empower, inspire, and delegate effectively to senior engineers, fostering an environment of technical excellence and continuous growth. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR * Technical Expertise and Leadership: Deep expertise in modern backend languages (ideally Go/Python) and large-scale, cloud-native systems. A proven technical leader who champions industry best practices, mentors peers, and drives the delivery of solutions to highly complex problems. * Problem Solving: A proven ability to solve highly complex problems of undefined scope, utilising your expertise for decision-making that actively influences the strategic direction of the department. * Production Operations: Extensive experience investigating complex issues across multiple environments, clusters, and products, with a demonstrated ability to drive systemic improvements to operational and production support processes. * Egoless Collaboration: A visionary mindset that does not accept the status quo. You are receptive to new ideas, able to see how different approaches can be combined advantageously, and focused on finding solutions that improve company and client outcomes. * Communication: Exceptional communication skills with the capability to provide leadership across a variety of stakeholders, drive organisational change, and set the direction for how engineers operate with technical excellence. Benefits * Highly competitive salary * Pension plan (match up to 5%) * Life insurance - three times annual salary * Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) * Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) * 25 days holiday and bank holidays * Flexible working hours * Cycle-to-work scheme * Electric car scheme * Season ticket loan * Access to outstanding learning materials and courses * Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine * All the latest tech you need * Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals * Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks * A talented and experienced team as your colleagues * An environment where we encourage learning and progress * Two charity days a year * Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia. We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.

Tide

ABOUT TIDE At Tide, we help SMEs save time and money in the running of their businesses by not only offering business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of highly usable and connected administrative solutions, from invoicing to accounting. Tide is transforming the small business banking market and now supports over 2 million members globally across the UK, India, Germany and France. Using advanced technology, all solutions are designed with SMEs in mind. With quick onboarding, low fees and innovative features, we thrive on making data driven decisions to serve our mission: to help SMEs save time and money so they can get back to doing what they love. Tide facts: * Tide is available for UK, Indian, German and French SMEs * Over 2 million members: 900,000 UK and 1,100,000 in India and growing rapidly * Over $300 million raised in funding * Over 2,800 Tideans globally * Recognised with Great Place to Work certification three years in a row, and among India’s Top 50 Best Workplaces in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance in 2026 * We have offices in Central London, with a member support and technology centre in Sofia, Bulgaria, technology centres in Serbia, Romania, Lithuania and Hyderabad and offices in Gurugram, New Delhi, Berlin, Paris and Luxembourg LOCATION : LONDON, BULGARIA, SERBIA AND LITHUANIA ABOUT THE ROLE Tide is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture of our agentic platform. You will shape the shared capabilities that allow AI systems to operate safely, reliably, and at scale across Tide. That includes context, orchestration, tool execution, trust controls, observability, and evaluation. You will participate in key build versus buy decisions, integrate external components where they accelerate us, and ensure we own the parts that matter most for Tide’s trust, data advantage, and long-term platform leverage. WHAT YOU WILL DO * Define the architecture for Tide’s agentic platform * Drive the design of shared services such as context APIs, tool layers, policy controls, and auditability * Partner with product, data, security, and engineering teams to turn use cases into reusable platform capabilities * Set standards for reliability, safety, scalability, and developer experience * Provide technical leadership across teams and unblock critical decisions * Implement cost-management and routing logic to optimize LLM spend across different providers * Design and build automated evaluation pipelines to measure agent reasoning accuracy and safety trajectories WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR * Deep experience building platform or infrastructure systems at scale * Strong judgement across APIs, distributed systems, data, and cloud-native architecture * Track record of leading complex cross-team technical problems * Experience integrating third-party platforms without losing control of core architecture * Strong understanding of reliability, security, and observability * Experience with AI platform components is valuable, but not essential * Experience in highly regulated industries (Fintech, Healthtech, etc.) where safety and compliance are core to the product is highly desirable  WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS This role will help determine whether Tide builds isolated AI pilots or a reusable platform that compounds value across productivity, risk, and connectivity. OUR TECH STACK: * Java, Spring Boot and JOOQ to build the RESTful APIs of our microservices (but we welcome people who are used to any strongly typed general purpose programming language!) * Event-driven architecture with messages over SNS+SQS and Kafka to make them reliable * Primary datastores are MySQL and PostgreSQL via RDS or Aurora (we are heavy AWS users) * Docker, Terraform, EKS used by the Cloud team to run the platform * DataDog and Rollbar to keep it running * GitHub with Sonarcloud, Semgrep and solid testing to power the CI/CD pipelines - new joiners are encouraged to have something deployed to production in their first 2 weeks * Angular 2+ with ngrx on Web, Flutter for the Mobile App * Fivetran/Snowflake/Looker for the BI insights and Python/Faust/Flask/Tecton + some ML libs for the automated decisioning and risk management WHAT YOU'LL GET IN RETURN * Flexible working options * Group Life Insurance * Vitality Health Insurance, with a proactive focus on mental and physical wellbeing * 25 days holiday with the ability to buy extra days * 3 days for L&D or volunteering time off per year * We invest in your development with a £1,000 professional L&D budget per year * Access to ‘salary sacrifice’ benefits such as Cycle to Work scheme and pension contribution * Spacious brand-new office near Old Street with an all-day snacks bar * Enhanced family-friendly leave * Sabbatical leave TIDEAN WAYS OF WORKING At Tide, we champion a flexible workplace model that supports both in-person and remote work to cater to the specific needs of our different teams.  While remote work is supported, we believe in the power of face-to-face interactions to foster team spirit and collaboration. Our offices are designed as hubs for innovation and team-building, where we encourage regular in-person gatherings to foster a strong sense of community. TIDE IS A PLACE FOR EVERYONE At Tide, we believe that we can only succeed if we let our differences enrich our culture. Our Tideans come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. We consider everyone irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity or differently-abled status. We celebrate diversity in our workforce as a cornerstone of our success. Our commitment to a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds is what enables us to build products that resonate with our members’ diverse needs and lives.  We are One Team and foster a transparent and inclusive environment, where everyone’s voice is heard.   At Tide, we thrive on diversity, embracing various backgrounds and experiences. We welcome all individuals regardless of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. Our inclusive culture is key to our success, helping us build products that meet our members' diverse needs. We are One Team, committed to transparency and ensuring everyone’s voice is heard.   Disclaimer   It has come to our attention that individuals or agencies are falsely claiming to represent Tide and are reaching out to candidates regarding job opportunities. Please be aware that: * Tide does not charge any fees at any stage of the recruitment process. * All official Tide job opportunities are listed exclusively on our Careers Page and applications should be submitted through this channel. * Communication from Tide will only come from an official @tide.co email address. * Tide does not work with agencies or recruiters without prior formal engagement, and we do not authorize third parties to make job offers on our behalf. If you are contacted by anyone misrepresenting Tide or requesting payment, please treat it as fraudulent and report it to us immediately at talent@tide.co Your safety and trust are important to us, and we are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent recruitment process.   Tide leverages AI to enhance our hiring experience. You can read more about how we use AI in our recruitment process in our AI Policy. Your personal data will be processed by Tide for recruitment purposes and in accordance with Tide's Recruitment Privacy Notice.