Senior Backend Engineers (Polyglot)

Cleo; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Mental health support

Sabbatical after four years

Learning & development platform

Retirement contributions

Location-specific leave entitlements

Job summary

Cleo is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join a cross-functional squad that improves users’ financial health. You’ll work with engineers, designers, analysts, and product partners to ship features across a polyglot stack, with emphasis on fundamentals and pragmatic trade-offs.

The role welcomes engineers who can ramp in Ruby or already have Ruby experience, and who value ownership, collaboration, and impact.

Qualifications

• Experience with a modern tech stack and sound technical decision making.
• Ability to learn quickly and reason about trade-offs.
• Comfort with Ruby or ability to ramp up quickly.

Responsibilities

• Shape direction of upcoming work with your squad and drive projects end-to-end.
• Build and evolve APIs, data models, and business logic.
• Contribute to testing, observability, and developer experience improvements.
• Drive high-impact initiatives like new features and pricing experiments.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to team culture.

Skills

Strong fundamentals

Ruby

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Kubernetes

AWS

PostgreSQL

Python

Job description

Most money apps talk at you. Cleo talks back

We’re not building another finance app. We’re building the world’s first AI financial assistant, one that actually understands your money and makes you better at it, and we’re changing the world’s relationship with money in the process For everyone, whatever their background or balance.

The proof: profitable, fast-growing, a unicorn with over $300M in ARR, and millions of people who now feel differently about their money.

We love original thinkers who challenge the status quo. We move fast, tell the truth, and there’s nowhere to hide from good work here. If that excites you more than it scares you, you’ll fit right in.

Follow us on LinkedIn for new features and the occasional roast

Meet The Team

Here at Cleo, we have ~200 Engineers organised into Pillars Here our stack spans a Ruby on Rails monolith, a single React Native (TypeScript) app frontend, Python for machine learning services, and PostgreSQL, all hosted on AWS and shipped through Kubernetes - backend goes out multiple times a week, app releases to Google and Apple at least weekly. To thrive here, our engineers proactively use our Engineering Principles to guide daily decisions, take ownership of problems beyond their own squad to drive broader impact, and actively drive their own learning, development and growth.

About The Role

We’re hiring Senior Backend Engineers to join one of our cross-functional product squads - working closely with other engineers, designers, analysts, and product partners to build features that improve our users’ financial health.

We care far more about how you think than which language you’ve used before. Much of our product runs on Ruby today, but we deliberately hire polyglot engineers: if you’ve shipped meaningful product work in any modern stack, you’ll ramp quickly here.

Key responsibilities for this role include:

• Shape the direction of upcoming work - break down ambiguous problems with your squad and help drive projects from early discovery through to shipped impact

• Build and evolve the APIs, data models, and business logic behind our product; no Ruby experience required, just strong fundamentals and sound judgement on trade-offs

• Contribute to testing, observability, and experimentation, and help continuously raise the bar on developer experience and product quality

• Drive high-impact initiatives such as our secured credit card, budgeting and financial insight features, and subscription/pricing experiments

• Mentor engineers at your level and beyond, share knowledge generously, and help build a culture where people grow quickly and have real influence

What We’re Looking For

• An experienced engineer with solid fundamentals, having worked across any modern tech stack - the specific language matters less than your ability to reason clearly, learn quickly, and think in trade-offs

• A track record of writing maintainable, thoughtful code and making sound technical decisions with minimal oversight

• Comfortable working with Ruby, or confident you can ramp up quickly in it - deep Ruby experience isn’t required

• Strong collaboration skills with product, design, and data partners, with genuine curiosity about users and their problems

• Experience mentoring or raising the bar for engineers around you, and contributing positively to team culture

• Motivated by Cleo’s mission - you care about building products that genuinely improve people’s financial health

• Alignment with our engineering principles - autonomy, accountability, pragmatism, and building things that matter

What we offer

We offer benefits package built to support you in and out of work. Benefits vary by country and include meaningful equity, comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance, mental health support, a paid one-month sabbatical after four years, a learning and development platform, pension or retirement contributions, and location-specific leave entitlements.

For the full breakdown on what’s available in your location, visit our Candidate Hub

What Matters

Cleo’s mission is to change the world’s relationship with money. We can’t do that without building a brilliant, genuinely diverse team - and making sure our hiring process gives everyone a fair shot, running a fair and transparent recruitment process in which every candidate is considered on their metris.

We’re glad to make reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process. If there’s anything we can do to support you in showing us your best, please let your recruiter or one of the team know.

We may use AI-assisted tools during the recruitment process to take support the team in different ways like taking notes or referring back to conversations. They do not replace the team and all applications are reviewed by a Cleo employee thoroughly!