Staff Kotlin Engineer

Job Description

[Employer hidden] is seeking a Staff Kotlin Engineer to join their profitable Fintech Unicorn. This role involves building and integrating new APIs, tuning services, and supporting product expansion. The ideal candidate will have strong Kotlin experience, mentorship skills, and a deep understanding of databases and software architectures. The company emphasizes collaborative design and building high-quality software in a happy and productive environment.

Who you are

• Strong commercial Kotlin experience
• Strong mentorship and coaching experience
• An ability to write simple, clean code
• Experience and understanding of databases; relational databases are a must, NoSql would be nice too
• Be able to quickly understand complex, financial business domains
• Understand different software architectures rapidly
• Understands abstraction and interpolation
• Able to write comprehensive, automated tests at all levels of the pyramid
• Understanding of the Kanban agile methodology; not a deal breaker if you don’t
• Someone who can get along with others and build relationships
• Someone who wants to continually learn, improve and collaborate
• Someone who can solve problems on their own but also knows when to go to their peers for help
• Someone who is a rational thinker and is aware of the ‘why’ behind the way they do things
• Someone who is a pragmatist who can sensibly weigh the tradeoffs between code quality and delivery

What the job involves

As we continue to build upon the diversity of our team we are thrilled to have the opportunity to bring on board a Lead Kotlin Engineer

This is an opportunity to bring new experience, perspective and capabilities to our design discussions, helping shape our approach to delivering elegant solutions to complex engineering challenges as we continue to grow

This is the team that put the Tech in FinTech, our current tech team is around 80 strong and have helped transform finance by building a next-generation lending platform, a next-gen credit card, and auto-finance product, a superapp and they’re at it again with brand new product launches this year

We're looking for an engineer with a depth of knowledge and recent hands-on Kotlin experience that enables them to not only deliver elegant, idiomatic solutions in Kotlin but also to contribute new knowledge and experience to our frequent collaborative design forums with stakeholders from every area of the business

There’s a lot to do; building and integrating new API’s, tuning our existing services as they scale, supporting our expansion of new products and supporting services in the US

We believe that software engineering is more than just code - it’s about people

We believe that the best teams are made of great people

That fundamentally great software engineering is about alignment, sharing what we know and being nice to each other

When we put all this together we make software engineering better by continually improving our capabilities as a team and making our working environment a happy and productive place

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Kotlin 1.7.20, AWS, GraphQL, Postgres, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes
• Frontend: React & React Native, TypeScript, MobX, Redux, Stylus and SASS
• We build our Kotlin projects using Gradle and GitHub Actions, deploying to production as soon as we finish a feature
• We use JUnit Jupiter, Kotest and TestContainers for automated testing

Responsibilities

• Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of [Employer hidden] from day 1
• Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo
• Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting

Application process

• A 30 minute introductory call with one of our engineers
• A short coding exercise to complete in your own time
• Onsite or Video Interview lasting 60-90 minutes, comprising of: Introduction of the team and kind of work you could be doing daily, Discussion around the coding exercise you completed, Interactive architecture/design exercise, Tech project walkthrough, Cultural/behavioural questions to see if you’d be a good fit for [Employer hidden], Questions you may have about the company, role, etc

Salary Benchmarks

Backend Engineer

Senior: £70k

Expert: £140k

Company Benefits

• Best-in-class compensation, including equity
• Comprehensive private health insurance (including dental, optometry and general wellbeing)
• Multiple opportunities to socialise with your team and the wider company
• Equipment provided for you to do your best work!
• Hybrid work model (work from home Monday/Friday, in office Tuesday-Thursday)
• In-house chefs prepare fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday
• EV car scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Pension
• 25 days of annual leave - excluding bank holidays
• 50% off gym memberships at Virgin Active and Nuffield (via Vitality health insurance)