Staff Engineer - Ruby | UK & EU (remote)

Cleo; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation package

Generous pay increases

Work-life balance flexibility

Paid sabbatical after 4 years

Job summary

Cleo is seeking a Staff Engineer to shape technical direction and drive delivery across teams in London. You'll partner with peers to define architecture, lead high-impact projects, and improve financial health for users.

Ideal candidates have robust experience with Ruby on Rails and technical leadership capabilities. The position offers a competitive compensation package, flexibility in working arrangements, and a vibrant team culture. Join Cleo in transforming how people manage their finances.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails is essential.
• Proven track record of building systems used beyond the immediate team.
• Excited to own and influence technical direction at a pillar level.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction and drive delivery across multiple squads.
• Define architecture and lead complex, high-impact initiatives.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads to grow future leaders.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Technical leadership

Mentorship

Long-term solutions

Tools

PostgreSQL

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

About Cleo

At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper‑intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating. Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast‑growing unicorn with over $300 million in ARR and growing over 2x year‑over‑year. This isn't just a job; it's a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are not only at the top of their field but also embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact. If you’re driven by complex challenges that push your expertise, the chance to shape something truly transformative, and the potential to share in Cleo’s success as we scale, while growing alongside a company that’s scaling fast, this might be your perfect fit.

What you’ll be doing

• Acting as a Staff IC across a pillar, shaping technical direction and driving delivery across multiple squads
• Partnering with senior peers to define architecture and lead complex, high‑impact initiatives
• Bringing teams together to ship ambitious product work that improves users’ financial health
• Building shared systems, patterns, and tooling that raise the bar across engineering
• Staying hands‑on in our Ruby on Rails monolith — designing APIs, data models, and scalable services
• Anticipating risks and opportunities early, influencing plans and technical strategy
• Mentoring engineers and TLs, growing the next generation of technical leaders

About You

• You’re excited by the opportunity to own and influence technical direction at a pillar level
• You’ve operated at senior/staff level across multiple teams or complex domains
• You bring strong technical judgment and think in long‑term, scalable solutions
• You’re comfortable leading without authority and aligning teams around a shared direction
• You have a track record of building systems and practices used beyond your immediate team
• You enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for others
• You have strong, hands‑on experience with Ruby on Rails (essential)
• You're based in the UK or Europe; we hire hybrid & remote in the UK & fully remotely across the EU. We love distributed teams. For this role, we’re ideally looking for candidates based within one hour either side of London time, to keep collaboration smooth and calendars sane.

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 Kubernetes. 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.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with 3 annual reviews, aligned to our termly OKR planning cycles. 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, 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
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London in the UK or EU, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
• Company-wide performance reviews every 4 months
• Generous pay increases for high‑performing team members
• Equity top‑ups for team members getting promoted
• An additional day for every year you spend at Cleo (up to 30 days)
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in‑person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI + Claude subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• And many more, depending on your location!

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.