Role details
- 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 I at Thought Machine, you will own and deliver highly complex, end-to-end engineering work items. You will look beyond immediate coding tasks to consider long-term system architecture, product strategy, and client outcomes.
- In this role, you will act as a technical anchor for your team, solving ambiguous problems, guiding less experienced engineers, and actively shaping our technical and product roadmaps.
- This is a role for an engineer who values clean, maintainable systems, embraces an egoless approach to collaboration, and is driven to deliver robust solutions to production.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Technical Leadership
- Design & Build: Design and build highly reliable, secure, and scalable software solutions for complex problems.
- Architecture & Standards: Contribute to team guidelines ensuring our services meet top-tier security, performance, cost, and reliability standards.
- Code Quality & Peer Review: Set a high bar for code quality by providing constructive, detailed feedback on design documents and pull requests.
- Operational Excellence: Investigate issues across multiple services in production, drive learning from operational incidents, and feed improvements back into our prioritisation process.
- Hiring: Actively participate in our growth by leading technical interviews.
Product & Delivery
- End-to-End Ownership: Own work items from initial concept to production, creating structured delivery plans, managing dependencies along the way and owning delivery of these work items.
- Product Vision: Partner with Product Managers to prioritize features, translate client
requirements
into technical specifications, and ensure solutions align with our overarching product vision.
- Incident Management: Confidently own the resolution of incidents, coordinating mitigation, fixes, and post-mortem artifacts.
Collaboration & Mentorship
- Team Growth: Mentor and support less experienced engineers, helping them level up technically and adapt to Thought Machine's engineering philosophy.
- Stakeholder Management: Translate highly technical problems and architectural decisions into clear concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in modern backend languages (ideally Go or Python) and experience building distributed, cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, gRPC, PostgreSQL).
- Problem Solving: A proven track record of breaking down ambiguous, and complex problems into clear, deliverable milestones.
- Production Operations: Experience supporting high-throughput systems in production environments and diagnosing complex issues across distributed systems.
- Egoless Collaboration: A highly collaborative, feedback-receptive mindset focused on finding the best outcomes for our clients and business rather than defending personal preferences.
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build consensus and document technical designs clearly.
Benefits
- Highly competitive salary
- Voluntary Pension Plan (match up to 5%)
- Private Healthcare Insurance
- Comprehensive Life Insurance
- 25 days holiday plus public holidays
- Two charity days a year
- Daily Meal Allowance
- Access to outstanding learning materials and courses
- Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine
- All the latest tech you need
- 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
- 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.