Staff Backend Engineer - Ruby

Cleo; London; Hybrid; GBP 109,000 - 132,000; Full time

Job summary

Cleo is looking for a passionate Ruby on Rails Engineer with at least 5 years of industry experience to join their cross-functional team in London. This role involves developing financial health features, mentoring peers, and working with a progressive tech stack. The position offers a competitive salary, hybrid-first working options, and comprehensive benefits to support employee well-being and growth.

Benefits

Competitive compensation package

Clear progression plan

Flexibility in working arrangements

Private Medical Insurance

Enhanced parental leave

Qualifications

• At least 5+ years of experience in Ruby on Rails.
• Experience with data analysis and mentoring junior engineers is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Collaborating within a product squad to develop features for enhancing user financial health.
• Mentoring colleagues and providing technical insight to improve delivery.
• Working on delivery via agile methodologies.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Data analysis

Collaboration

Mentoring

Tools

PostgreSQL

AWS

React Native

TypeScript

Job description

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there's anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

About Cleo

Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being.

Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we've reached millions of people to support them throughout their financial lives, from their first paycheck to their first home and beyond. We're hitting headlines too. This year, Forbes named us as one of their Next Billion Dollar Startups, and we were crowned the 'Hottest Tech Scaleup' at the Europas.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.
What you'll be doing

• Staff IC within a cross-functional product squad and collaborating with a mix of engineers, designers, analysts and other disciplines to develop features that enhance our users' financial health.
• Collaborating with other senior peers in your pillar to provide technical insight into upcoming work, and leading the delivery by helping pull everyone together to get it shipped.
• Mentoring colleagues to help them grow as engineers and actively supporting their development.
• Working on our Ruby on Rails monolith, building data models, APIs, and business logic services.
• Delivering your work using agile methodologies and tools like tests, observability, AB-tests, and feature flags.
• Analysing data to identify problems and generate new ideas, using various sources such as our database, application logs, and user research data.
• Supporting colleagues through in-hours support and optionally joining the compensated out-of-hours on-call rotation.
• Contributing to cross-cutting concerns that improve our engineering efforts.
• Taking part in shaping the work of your squad beyond technical aspects, participating in product ideation, user research, design reviews, retrospectives, and more.

Here are some examples, big and small, of the kinds of product feature work our engineers have taken part in over the last year:

• Building a secured credit card
• Launching new budget analysis features
• implementing pricing experiments for subscriptions

Want to hear more from our engineers? Check out Magda's blog post.
Our Tech Stack

Cleo is built as a Ruby on Rails monolith with a single React Native app frontend, utilising TypeScript. We also leverage Python for machine learning services and PostgreSQL for our database, all hosted on AWS. Our CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, with production deployments happening on every merge via Heroku. Our backend engineers deploy multiple times a week, and we release our frontend app to Google and Apple for review at least once a week.

While we take a pragmatic approach, we place a strong emphasis on quality. Our code is peer-reviewed, and we maintain automated testing using Minitest and CircleCI. We're also actively working towards a more modular architecture, focusing on separating concerns to achieve all the benefits of microservices within a monolith, while progressively refactoring our code as we build new features. Everyone in the engineering team contributes to driving our technical strategy, voices & ideas from all levels are valued: we are all owners at Cleo.
About you

You are passionate about making a positive difference in society by improving the financial health of our users. You align with our company values and engineering principles, which drive our ways of working and software delivery.

As this is an SE5 position as described in our public progression framework we're looking for someone who has at least 5+ years industry experience of using Ruby on Rails. If it's not quite that much, maybe you want to look at our other Backend roles.
What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (£109,763 - £131,626 base + equity). You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Sofina, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility: We can't fight for the world's financial health if we're not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work.
• Hybrid-first: Join our hybrid-first team, where we blend the best of both remote and in-office work. We expect our team members to be in our London office 1-2 times a week. On Thursdays, we buy you lunch but you can come in whichever days work best! We can consider fully-remote candidates for SE4 level - for our remote employees we'll cover your travel to the London office every term (every four months).
• Other benefits;
  • • Check out our new benefits package here: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/big-benefits-energy-the-latest-cleo-employee-benefits
    • 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
    • 6% employer-matched pension
    • Company-wide performance reviews every 8 months e.g every 2 terms, in line with our termly cycles (Jan-April, May-Aug, Sept-Dec):
      • Generous pay increases for high-performers and high-growth team members
      • Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted
    • Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
    • Enhanced parental leave
    • 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
    • Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
    • We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
    • Online mental health support via Spill
    • And many more!

UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK. If you're an existing user, you'll still have access to the app. But some features won't be available. Why? 99% of our users are based in the US - where financial health is often overlooked. We've decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we'll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future.

For more info on next steps, please visit our Engineering Interview process page: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/how-we-do-engineering-interviews-at-cleo