Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team

iwoca; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Medical insurance from Vitality

Private GP service

25 days’ holiday per year

Birthday day off

Sabbatical after four years

Counselling access

3% Pension contributions

Employee equity incentive scheme

Parental leave and nursery tax benefit

Electric car scheme

Company retreats

Learning and development budget

Offices in London

Job summary

iwoca in London is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Operations Tech Team. You will own end-to-end projects for the CRM used by sales, account management, credit and collections, and help shape its data models and service boundaries.

This hands-on IC role includes mentoring, design reviews, and collaborating with product owners. The role also involves exploring AI-enabled workflows and migrating monolith components to scalable services.

Qualifications

• Designed large production systems and core domain models.
• Led technical decisions across a team as an IC and mentored peers.
• Solved operational problems with non-technical partners to deliver a solution.
• Built AI-enabled or AI-assisted workflows to scale engineering output.
• Communicated clearly, tailoring detail to the audience.
• Experience with both backend services and service boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end projects for the Operations Tech CRM used by multiple teams.
• Define and enforce service boundaries and domain models for the CRM.
• Review designs, mentor engineers, and uphold coding standards.

Skills

System design

Backend engineering

Technical leadership

Operational problems

AI leverage

Communication

Tools

Python

Django

Celery

PostgreSQL

Job description

Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team

Hybrid in London, UK

We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Operations Tech team.

You’ll influence the technical direction of iwoca’s in-house CRM and build parts of it yourself – the system that hundreds of staff across sales, account management, credit, and collections use to give our customers five-star service.

The company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.

We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The team

The Operations Tech team builds the tools iwoca’s UK operations teams use every day: the CRM, and the systems behind phone calls, emails, notifications, and task management. Those tools are a competitive advantage – they help colleagues manage risk and enable the outstanding customer service that sets iwoca apart.

The team works closely with the Operations Strategy team, which sets operational priorities and scopes much of the tooling. Many of its users work in the same building, and you’ll see how your changes affect the people you work with.

We’re growing the team to ten engineers (including this role), two of them tech leads, and two product owners. Most of its time goes on quarterly roadmap projects, alongside a support rota, and regular small feature improvements.

The role

As a staff backend engineer, you’ll take whole projects end to end: work out what operations teams need, design it, build it, and look after it in production. You’ll decide with the tech leads where the CRM’s service boundaries sit and how to model each domain’s data. You’ll judge your work by what it changes for those teams and their customers.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with no line management, but you’ll mentor the engineers around you. You’ll often pair with a more junior engineer, share what you know, and set the standards the team works to through design discussions and code review.

You’ll learn how iwoca lends, from credit decisions to collections and financial crime. The team is adding AI to the CRM’s workflows, and you’ll have a say in where it helps.

Live project examples:

• Migrating the monolith. Moving CRM functionality out of iwoca’s Django monolith into separate services, such as customer contact and phone calls, that deploy and scale on their own.

• Building customer-facing AI agents to take the load off our teams as we grow, and the infrastructure to make them reliable and trustworthy

• Improving our onboarding journey to so that there’s less manual work getting a customer their funds, for example using LLMs to speed up compliance checks

• Credit card operations. Building the CRM services that let operations teams support customers on iwoca’s business credit card.

• iwocaChat. Extending the Claude-powered assistant that answers operations staff questions about a customer, using data held across several systems.

The requirements

Essential:

• System design. You’ve designed large production systems and the domain models at their core, and changed their architecture while people relied on them.

• Backend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You’ve written and run backend services in it.

• Technical leadership. You’ve led technical decisions across a team as an individual contributor, and helped other engineers grow through code reviews and design sessions.

• Operational problems. You’ve worked with non-technical colleagues to understand a problem they had, and built the system that solved it.

• AI leverage. You’ve built agentic workflows, or used AI to scale your engineering output beyond what you could deliver alone. You judge when to use it and when not to, and you check its output before it reaches production.

• Communication. You write and speak clearly, directly, and concisely. You adapt technical detail to your audience.

Bonus:

• Python stack. You’ve worked with Python, Django, Celery, and PostgreSQL.

• Full-stack. You’ve contributed to frontend codebases, particularly in React or TypeScript.

• Monolith migration. You’ve moved functionality out of a large monolith into separate services, while both stayed in production.

• Asynchronous systems. You’ve built services that communicate through message queues such as RabbitMQ.

• Contact systems. You’ve worked on telephony, email, or messaging systems, such as Twilio.

• Models in production systems. You’ve built systems that use model outputs to make operational decisions, such as which work to prioritise.

The salary

We expect to pay from £100,000 to £130,000 for this role. But, we're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.

We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.

• Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.

The benefits

• Flexible working hours.

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.

• Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links:

• iwoca benefits & policies

• Interview welcome pack (TAP)