Job Description

Founding Staff Engineer (Web Platform)

Valencia Office - Hybrid: 4 days in the office, 1 day working from home

Build the banking experience the world's businesses deserve.

Ebury is a global fintech, headquartered in London. We help businesses move money across borders — FX, payments, and lending — in 140+ currencies, sending payments to 160+ countries across 30+ regulated markets, delivered by 2,000+ experts in 40+ offices worldwide and backed by the stability of majority-owner Santander. That's a bank's reach and reliability with the pace of a product team. And we've set ourselves a deliberately hard bar: beat the best digital-first experience in our market, not merely match the incumbents.
That bar is an engineering problem. It's your engineering problem — and you'll be solving it directly on the platforms our clients touch every day: the web portal, the mobile apps, the APIs. This isn't back-office plumbing. Every role in this hub builds client-facing products, and the mission is unambiguous: build the best banking-and-payments experience in the market.
We also expect you to be AI-native. Not "curious about AI" — fluent. You use AI coding tools as a genuine force multiplier in how you build, and you know how to design AI into the product — so clients get answers and outcomes instead of forms and waiting.
We're opening a new engineering hub in Valencia, and you'd be one of its founding product engineers — not employee #400, but one of the first setting how this team builds, what "good" means here, and which product bets are worth making.

Why this role is different

• You'll own outcomes, not tickets. A product engineer at Ebury takes a real client problem — "businesses can't see why a payment is held" — and owns it end to end: the experience, the services and APIs behind it, the data, the measurement, and the iteration after launch. You'll have opinions about what to build and the standing to act on them. If you like being handed a fully-specced ticket and nothing else, this isn't your role. If you want a slice of a product and the trust to make it genuinely good, read on.
• You'll build platforms, not one-offs. Our third principle is blunt: never build for one client, region, or deal — generalise before committing, or decline. New currencies and payment rails are onboarded as configuration and adapters, not bespoke branches. And finish-and-tidy is part of the work — cutover, decommission, delete the dead code. We reward the engineer who retires a flag, not just the one who ships the feature.
• You'll work on the real thing. Client-facing web and mobile channels evolving in parallel; an event-driven, API-first transactional platform on AWS where services own their data and talk only through known contracts; a governed GCP/BigQuery data world. Money-movement discipline — idempotency, deterministic retries, reconciliation — is table stakes, because we're handling businesses' actual cash.
• You'll ship fast, and you'll ship AI-native. Deploy continuously, CI/CD with policy-as-code gates, observability as a definition-of-done. AI is woven into both sides of the work: how we build (coding assistants as a real force multiplier, with prompts and guardrails treated as first-class, versioned artefacts) and what we build (client-facing, permission-aware knowledge and summarisation, smart defaults that pre-empt the client's next question). You'll be expected to reach for AI by default, judge where it genuinely improves the client experience, and know where the human-in-the-loop line sits on regulated decisions.
  Your work will be measured by client outcomes. Self-service completion, time-to-answer, the reliability and latency of core journeys as the client experiences them — these are first-class engineering metrics here, not an afterthought.

What you'll do in your first year

• Days 1–30: ship your first change to production in the first few days (we pre-scope it and pair you with a buddy), learn the domain, own a small feature end to end.
• By 90 days: own a defined product area, lead a project with a short design doc, join the on-call rotation for what you build, and start mentoring the next hire.
• Across the year: take client problems from ambiguous idea to shipped, measured, iterated product; help set the standards, interview bar, and culture for a hub that's growing around you.

What your responsible for

• Provide technical leadership across one or more critical domains, owning the design and evolution of large-scale, business-critical systems within our global financial platform.
• Set architectural direction by leading system design, making high-leverage technical decisions, and driving alignment on long-term technology strategy across teams.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to translate business outcomes into scalable, resilient technical solutions, influencing roadmap decisions and trade-offs.
• Operate across the full system lifecycle, from early discovery and architecture through to production operations, reliability, performance, and cost optimisation.
• Raise the technical bar organisation-wide by defining and evolving engineering standards, guiding design reviews, and mentoring senior engineers to multiply impact beyond your own code.
• Act as a force multiplier by identifying systemic risks, technical debt, and cross-team dependencies early, and proactively driving initiatives that improve velocity, quality, and resilience at scale.
• Champion engineering excellence through strong opinions on testing strategies, CI/CD, observability, and operational readiness, ensuring systems are secure, compliant, and production-grade.

Lead by example in modern engineering practices, including the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery and learning, while maintaining deep understanding, accountability, and ownership of all solutions produced.

What we look for

• Strong technical foundation in computer science or a closely related discipline, gained through formal education and/or equivalent industry experience, with evidence of continuous learning and technical depth.
• Extensive experience building and operating production systems at scale. While this often aligns with 10+ years in industry, we value demonstrated impact, sound judgement, and leadership over tenure alone.
• Deep understanding of core computer science concepts — including data structures, algorithms, system design, and complexity trade-offs and the ability to apply them pragmatically to real-world, high-scale problems.
• Proven ability to design, write, and evolve high-quality software in one or more modern programming languages, with a strong focus on maintainability, performance, and operational robustness.
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, able to decompose ambiguous, multi-dimensional problems and drive them to clear, effective technical outcomes.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, capable of articulating complex technical ideas clearly, building alignment across teams, and constructively challenging assumptions at all levels.
• A collaborative, leadership mindset, with a track record of mentoring engineers, raising technical standards, and contributing positively to engineering culture beyond individual delivery.
• For every product engineer here
• You ask why a feature exists before how to build it, and you're curious about the users and the metrics behind it.
• You reason about trade-offs holistically — client value and business context, not only the code.
• You're pragmatic about scope: you know the difference between an MVP that teaches you something and gold-plating that doesn't.
• You're comfortable making a product call without a fully-specified ticket, and changing your mind when the data says so.
• You're AI-native: AI coding tools are already part of how you work and you get measurably more done with them; bonus if you've shipped AI features into a product and have a view on where they help the user and where they don't.
• You care about quality because you've handled money-adjacent systems, or you're the kind of engineer who would: correctness, reliability, and the un-glamorous finish-and-tidy that keeps a codebase healthy.
• Working English (our engineering language);
• Nice to have: fintech / payments / regulated-domain experience; the other of web/mobile; experience being early at a new office or founding team.
• We hire on a clear bar and a fast, respectful process — if it's not a definite yes, it's a no, and we tell you quickly either way.

What we offer

Highly competitive compensation, including a strong base salary, performance-based bonus, and a comprehensive benefits package, aligned to the impact and scope of a senior technical leadership role.
A clearly defined Engineer / Staff / Principal career path, with transparent expectations, senior-level mentorship, and multiple growth vectors — including technical leadership, architectural ownership, and organisational influence.
The opportunity to work on complex, high-leverage problems at scale, where your decisions directly shape core platforms, customer outcomes, and long-term business performance.
A genuine founding role in a new hub — real ownership, visible impact, and a hand in shaping how the site works. This window doesn't come round twice.
Meaningful ownership from day one, with responsibility for critical systems and initiatives, and the autonomy to drive improvements across architecture, reliability, and engineering effectiveness.
High End Macbook Pro or equivalent Linux device, we want you to have the best equipment
A high-performing, inclusive engineering culture within a fast-growing, global FinTech, where technical excellence, thoughtful decision-making, and constructive challenge are valued and rewarded.

How the interview works

Four stages, run fast and structured — usually final interview within a week, decision within 48 hours:
Intro chat (~25 min) — you, us, the role
Code Signal (90mins) - online coding test, mimics real world work, not just algo challenges..
Systems Design (~60 min) — work on a real problem with our engineers to collaboratively design a solution.
Hiring Manager & Product Leader (~60 min) - lets get to know you, how you think about solving problems for clients, what you’ve delivered and how we can help accelerate your career

Ready to build?
If you want to help set the bar for a new engineering hub — building money software transparent enough that clients never need to ask a human what the system already knows — we'd love to talk.