Mid Product Engineer (Scala)

Yonder Global Group; London; Hybrid; GBP 53,000 - 69,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial technology firm in London is seeking a Senior Product Engineer (Scala) to join its team. You'll develop backend services that power crucial features like payments and rewards systems. The ideal candidate has experience in production-ready services and a passion for functional programming, along with a customer-focused approach. This role offers a salary between £53,578 and £68,267, plus stock options and a range of benefits including 35 holidays and private healthcare.

Benefits

35 holidays (27 days annual leave + 8 days public leave)

Private healthcare with Vitality

Learning & training allowance (£750/year)

Regular team events

Qualifications

• Strong track record of building robust production-ready services.
• Interest and experience in functional programming with Scala is a bonus.
• Expertise in designing and implementing RESTful APIs.
• Experience with Kafka or similar event-driven architectures.
• Expertise in micro-services and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop production-grade backend services in Scala.
• Implement event-driven features with Kafka.
• Ship features from concept through live deployment.
• Contribute to the architecture of distributed micro-services.
• Manage and improve cloud infrastructure (GCP).

Skills

Production-Ready Services

Functional Programming

RESTful APIs

Kafka or Event-Driven Systems

Micro-services Development

Customer-Focused Approach

Ownership & Drive

Growth Mindset

Tools

Scala

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

What’s Yonder?

“It's as if Time Out, Amex and Monzo had a baby” - Will T, Yonder Member

We’re building the financial membership of the future. One that works for how you live now. Not how your parents banked in the ‘90s.

Yonder combines credit and debit in one membership, designed to be fair, flexible, and actually enjoyable to use. No confusing terms. No dusty points system. Just rewards that actually feel rewarding - from bao to beer to a boarding pass.

We raised £23.4M in September 2024 to grow the team, launch even better rewards, and expand beyond the UK. If that sounds good to you, you’ll probably like it here.

Sounds cool. What’s my part in this?

Over the last year we've added a debit card, a free membership tier, hundreds of new independent partners around the country, countless product improvements and our personal favourite, Yonder Flights, a new way to use Yonder points on any flight with any airline globally. We've maintained a 4.5 TrustPilot rating and our customers really love us (and we love them back... hi!).

We’re looking for a Senior Product Engineer (Scala) to join our growing team of backend engineers. We’re looking for someone who loves solving consumer problems with straightforward technical solutions and is happy to jump in and wear many hats (lots of the backend team also work on Infrastructure changes). You’ll get to work on everything from what happens when a customer taps their card, to our in-house core banking system or our unique approach to credit card rewards.

You'll be joining a small engineering team with end-to-end ownership over the development lifecycle, system architecture and infrastructure. As a small team, the work you do has a huge impact and you’ll get to shape the future of engineering at Yonder. You’ll wear many hats, spending time building new micro-services to maintaining the infrastructure that they all run on.

What you’ll do

Build

• Develop production-grade backend services in Scala, powering payments, core banking, and rewards systems.
• Implement event-driven features with Kafka and integrate multiple internal/external services.
• Ship features end-to-end, from concept through to live deployment, with measurable customer impact.

Design

• Contribute to the architecture of our distributed micro-services, ensuring scalability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Design RESTful APIs and data flows that integrate seamlessly with frontend and partner systems.
• Participate in lightweight architecture reviews to share knowledge and guide technical decisions.

Operate

• Manage and improve our cloud infrastructure (GCP), containerised workloads (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimise system performance in production.
• Apply best practices for reliability, observability, and security across our stack.

Collaborate

• Work closely with product and design to deliver features that delight our members.
• Pair with other engineers to solve problems, review code, and raise the team’s technical bar

You're a great fit if you

Experience with Production-Ready Services: Possess a strong track record of building services that are robust and ready for production use.

Interest in Functional Programming: Fan of immutable data, flatMaps, and strongly typed APIs. ****Knowledge of Scala in particular is a bonus.

Expertise in RESTful APIs: Have a solid background in designing and implementing RESTful APIs.

Familiarity with Kafka or Event-Driven Systems: Bring experience with Kafka or similar event-driven architectures, demonstrating an understanding of their dynamics and integrations.

Micro-services and Distributed Systems Experience: Expertise in developing and managing micro-services and understanding of distributed systems concepts.

Customer-Focused Approach: Prioritise solving customer problems over focusing solely on specific technologies, showing a keen understanding of user needs.

Comfort with Ambiguity: Excel in ambiguous situations, enjoying the challenge of setting your own direction and navigating through uncertainty.

Ownership & Drive: Thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, taking full ownership from idea to delivery and driving projects forward under tight deadlines.

Growth Mindset: Eager to learn, adapt, and master new skills while tackling complex challenges head-on.

You won’t be a great fit if you

Prefer working in large, structured teams with well-defined processes over fast-moving, evolving environments.

Focus solely on technical perfection without balancing customer impact and business needs.

Struggle with taking ownership or making decisions in situations where the path forward isn’t fully defined.

Are uncomfortable diving into areas outside your core expertise (e.g., infrastructure, DevOps, or unfamiliar parts of the stack).

Seeking a Strict 9–5: Our pace and priorities often require flexibility beyond standard hours, especially when shipping on tight deadlines.

What’s it like working at Yonder?

We’re office-first, remote-friendly

We’re based in our Hoxton office, complete with a terrace, breakfast, coffee (from a barista), dogs, beer taps and plenty of comfortable space to do your best work. We ask you to come into the office at least 3 days a week, with everyone coming in on Mondays.

???? We take a values-led approach

Our principles are incredibly important to us, so we recommend you check them out here: Our DNA

We take development really seriously

We have a pretty structured process for progression, with fortnightly one-on-ones and quarterly peer perspectives. We also take some time at the end of each week to reflect and celebrate what we’ve learned and achieved.

What’s in it for me?

Depending on your skill set and what you can bring from day one, you’ll be looking at:

£53,578 - 68,267 annual salary depending on experience

£34,064 - 60,994 stock options

Plus

️ 35 holidays (27 days annual leave + 8 days public leave)

2x team-building offsites per year (1 in the UK, 1 abroad)

️???? Private healthcare with Vitality, including mental health, dental & vision cover

16 weeks enhanced parental leave for all parents after being with Yonder for 1 year

Financial coaching with Octopus Money

Learning & training allowance (£750/year) that you can use on books, courses, etc

Regular team breakfasts and lunch

️ Regular team events like Mini-golf, Escape Room, Cocktail making

Cycle-to-work scheme

️ Fresh pour-over coffee made by our very own CEO, Tim

What’s the interview process like?

We take the candidate experience really seriously, so we’ve made the process as transparent as possible. We also promise to be super responsive, and will never leave you wondering where you stand for weeks on end.

Here’s how it works:

• Stage 1: Intro call (45 mins):
  You will have an initial Meets call with Harry Ford to find out more about you and to tell you more about us.
  
  
• Stage 2: Case interview / Take home task (60 mins):
  This is your time to shine, you can either send over an example of your proudest work or we can send you a small exercise to demonstrate your skills.
  
  
• Stage 3: Face-to-face interview (2 hours):
  Two 60-minute interviews to learn more about how you work. This will also be a great opportunity for you to meet the rest of the team so we would love it if you can come into the office for it! Interviews will be structured as follows:
  
  
  • Experience interview: We'll deep dive into your technical experience, talk about projects you've worked on and work through designing a system on a whiteboard.
  • Values interview: We want to learn more about how you work - we’ll ask you questions related to our principles (Our DNA). This stage will be with two people from our wider team.
    
    We’ll also include a 15-minute comfort break ️
• Stage 4: Offer If everyone’s happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us - YAY! We hope to always give you a decision between each stage within 24 hours (where possible).

Other things to know:

• We love closing the feedback loop at Yonder. You can expect specific feedback on our decision from Stage 2 onwards, and you can always ask for more.
• We must complete right to work & criminal, politically exposed persons, and default to credit notice background checks for every new Yonder-er for compliance purposes because we handle sensitive customer data.
• We also do reference checks, ideally with your most recent manager on the phone.
• We like to move quickly at Yonder, so we will be ready to onboard you once the above checks are complete - the entire process can take between 2 - 6 weeks.
  

We know that diverse teams build better products. If you’re from an under-represented community, we’d especially love to hear from you.

Even if you don’t feel 100% qualified, please do apply anyway. Your attitude and desire to grow are just as important as your experience.