Senior Back End Engineer

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.

Software Engineering is a key role within Thought Machine. As an engineering-focused company, we take pride in our engineering excellence, adopting best practices, and utilising modern technologies.

Thought Machine software engineers work across the stack to solve complex engineering problems that have not been solved before. As a result, while development at Thought Machine is fast-paced, you will be expected to develop code to the highest standards that scales, is secure, performant, and provides a great user experience. Software Engineers will take complete ownership of a requirement, converting it into an engineering design, task breakdown, and implementation. You'll be responsible for building both backend services and frontend experiences.

Our clients range from the world's largest financial institutions to smaller regional banks. Our systems must cater to each of these use cases, so we care deeply about providing the ability to configure and customise the user experience based on the client's or end user's persona. Software engineers are expected to bridge the gap between back-end and front-end, crafting delightful experiences that delight all our clients.

This is a full-time, permanent position based in our Lisbon office, requiring four days a week onsite.

Back End Engineering is a key role within Thought Machine as Back End Engineers lead the development of Thought Machine’s Vault product. We pride ourselves in excellence in this role, adopting the best practices in continuous deployment monorepo style development.

While development at Thought Machine is fast paced, you will be expected to develop code to a high standard and production ready state.

DUTIES

• Design, implement and develop scalable, performant microservices using best practices.

• Write automated unit tests, integrate tests, etc.

• Interfacing with other engineering teams to ensure that features are added in a structured and coherent way.

• Managing and debugging your deployments from testing environments all the way to production.

• Translating customer requirements into trackable tickets.

Essential

• 6+ years of experience as a Software Engineer.

• Experience with either Python or Golang.

• Experience in developing automated tests as an integral part of the development cycle.

• Interest in working on client-facing projects, conducting scoping and defining deliverables.

Desirable

• Knowledge of banking / finance.

• Experience with AWS or other cloud providers.

• Familiar with databases (SQL or noSQL).

• Experience with client/server software architectures & networking, or microservice architectures.

• Experience using orchestration tools such as Kubernetes or Mesos.

• Experience of either managing a team, or a desire to manage a team in the future.

• Experience developing and deploying AI-powered applications.

• Experience with user-centered design principles with a proven ability to build self-service platforms that enhance developer productivity and autonomy.

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.