Staff Kotlin & JVM Engineer

Lendable; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company is hiring a Staff/Lead Kotlin Engineer to join their growing technology team. The role requires strong Kotlin or JVM experience along with the ability to manage complex engineering challenges. Candidates should have a proven track record in writing clean code, mentorship experience, and a willingness to engage in collaborative design discussions. With opportunities for career advancement and an inclusive work environment, this position is ideal for those passionate about fintech innovation.

Benefits

Best-in-class compensation

Private health insurance

Flexible work-from-home options

Fully stocked kitchen in the office

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience in Kotlin or JVM based engineering.
• Proven ability to write simple, clean code.
• Experience with relational databases is a must.

Responsibilities

• Build and integrate new APIs for upcoming products.
• Support tuning of services as they scale.
• Collaborate with teams to deliver robust solutions.

Skills

Kotlin or JVM based engineering experience

Strong mentorship and coaching experience

Write simple, clean code

Understanding of databases

Ability to understand complex financial domains

Knowledge of software architectures

Automated testing skills

Kanban agile methodology understanding

Tools

Kotlin 1.7.20

AWS

GraphQL

Postgres

RabbitMQ

Docker

Kubernetes

React & React Native

TypeScript

MobX

Redux

Stylus

SASS

Job description

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to build the world's best technology to help people get credit and save money. We’re building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

• Lendable is one of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of just over 600 people
• Among the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK
• Profitable since 2017
• Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs
• Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9 across 10,000s of reviews on Trustpilot)

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days.

We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of financial products are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

Join us if you want to

1. Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1
2. Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo
3. Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting

About the role

As we continue to build upon the diversity of our team we are thrilled to have the opportunity to bring on board a Staff/Lead Kotlin Engineer. This is an opportunity to bring new experience, perspective and capabilities to our design discussions, helping shape our approach to delivering elegant solutions to complex engineering challenges as we continue to grow. This is the team that put the Tech in FinTech: our current tech team is around 80 strong and have helped transform finance by building a next‑generation lending platform, a next‑gen credit card, and auto‑finance product, a Superapp and they’re at it again with brand new product launches this year.

We're looking for an engineer with a depth of knowledge and recent hands‑on Kotlin experience or JVM based engineering experience that enables them to not only deliver elegant, idiomatic solutions in Kotlin or Java but also to contribute new knowledge and experience to our frequent collaborative design forums with stakeholders from every area of the business.

There’s a lot to do; building and integrating new APIs, tuning our existing services as they scale, supporting our expansion of new products and supporting services in the US.

We believe that software engineering is more than just code – it’s about people. We believe that the best teams are made of great people. That fundamentally great software engineering is about alignment, sharing what we know and being nice to each other. When we put all this together we make software engineering better by continually improving our capabilities as a team and making our working environment a happy and productive place.

There is more to read about us and our Lendies in the engineering blog right here and if you’d like to check our reviews out on Glassdoor you can see these here.

Our Tech Stack

Backend

• Kotlin 1.7.20
• AWS
• GraphQL (it would be nice if you were familiar with this but it’s not a deal breaker)
• Postgres
• RabbitMQ
• Docker
• Kubernetes

Frontend

• React & React Native, TypeScript, MobX, Redux, Stylus and SASS

Other

• We build our Kotlin projects using Gradle and GitHub Actions, deploying to production as soon as we finish a feature
• We use JUnit Jupiter, Kotest and TestContainers for automated testing

What we’re looking for technically

• Strong commercial Kotlin or JVM based engineering experience (willingness to work with Kotlin)
• Strong mentorship and coaching experience
• An ability to write simple, clean code
• Experience and understanding of databases; relational databases are a must, NoSql would be nice too
• Be able to quickly understand complex, financial business domains
• Understand different software architectures rapidly
• Understands abstraction and interpolation
• Able to write comprehensive, automated tests at all levels of the pyramid
• Understanding of the Kanban agile methodology; not a deal breaker if you don’t

What we’re looking for in a team member

• Someone who can get along with others and build relationships
• Someone who wants to continually learn, improve and collaborate
• Someone who can solve problems on their own but also knows when to go to their peers for help
• Someone who is a rational thinker and is aware of the ‘why’ behind the way they do things
• Someone who is a pragmatist who can sensibly weigh the tradeoffs between code quality and delivery

Interview process

• A 30 minute introductory call with one of our engineers
• A short coding exercise to complete in your own time
• Onsite or Video Interview lasting 60-90 minutes, comprising of:
  • Introduction of the team and kind of work you could be doing daily
  • Discussion around the coding exercise you completed
  • Interactive architecture/design exercise
  • Tech project walkthrough
  • Cultural/behavioural questions to see if you’d be a good fit for Lendable
  • Questions you may have about the company, role, etc

Life at Lendable

• The opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies.
• Best-in-class compensation, including equity.
• You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish – on the other days, those based in the UK come together IRL at our Shoreditch office in London to be together, build and exchange ideas.
• Enjoy a fully stocked kitchen with everything you need to whip up breakfast, lunch, snacks, and drinks in the office every Tuesday‑Thursday.
• We care for Lendies’ well‑being both physically and mentally, so we offer coverage when it comes to private health insurance
• We're an equal‑opportunity employer and are looking to make Lendable the most inclusive and open workspace in London

Check out our blog!