Remote opportunity at
PleoSenior Backend Engineer (Data serving)
Pleo is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for its Data Serving team. The team is responsible for the line where Pleo's unprocessed product data meets every…
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About This Role
Pleo is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for its Data Serving team. The team is responsible for the line where Pleo's unprocessed product data meets every downstream consumer, including internal product groups, AI agents and customers reading their own records. The engineer builds and owns the APIs and low-latency serving layer underneath them, where contract stability and speed are essential. Pleo makes spend management software that simplifies money handling for…
Job Description
Pleo is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for its Data Serving team. The team is responsible for the line where Pleo's unprocessed product data meets every downstream consumer, including internal product groups, AI agents and customers reading their own records. The engineer builds and owns the APIs and low-latency serving layer underneath them, where contract stability and speed are essential.
Pleo makes spend management software that simplifies money handling for finance teams and employees. It reports more than 40,000 customers and a team of over 850 people. The role is remote, and the posting says candidates can work in a remote, hybrid or office-based setup in listed locations, provided they live in their chosen country with the right to work there. Applications close at 08:00 CEST on the 13th of October 2026.
The engineer reports to the VP of Data and works alongside platform and data engineering colleagues, product managers, the GenAI Platform team and the Data Infrastructure team. The work includes a versioned, performant Data API that serves internal reporting, customer features and third-party connectors; read models, indexes and caching in Postgres; a near-real-time aggregation service; and access control with row- and column-level permissions and full audit trails. The posting describes hands-on delivery with a clear scope rather than an advisory role, and calls extensive API design experience, OLAP expertise and Kotlin critical.
Responsibilities
- Own the Data API boundary: endpoints that are clean, versioned and quick, serving reporting tools, product features and outside integrations
- Design and tune read models, indexes and caching in Postgres, and in any future OLAP stores, to keep queries fast
- Connect the serving layer reliably to the Kotlin services in Pleo's product backend, so the right data is exposed
- Be accountable for the uptime and speed of what you ship, covering monitoring, incident handling and SLOs
- Define clean contracts with data engineers between the ingestion layer and the serving database
- Coordinate with the access-control group to protect APIs via widely used authentication and authorization standards
- Create a fast-updating aggregation service that gathers and merges data from across Pleo's services
- Run access control and permissions, with row- and column-level restrictions and audit trails
Requirements
- Solid background in server-side work for reporting APIs and the serving infrastructure beneath them
- A mindset focused on reliability, latency and SLOs
- Track record with API boundary layers: clean endpoints, versioning and stable contracts that keep consumers away from raw sources
- Deep skill with read-heavy systems: tuning relational databases, indexes, materialized views, caches and API speed
- Sound grounding in SQL and NoSQL databases, strong query writing, and deep Kafka experience
- Deep work in a JVM language, since Pleo's product backend runs on Kotlin
- Experience with AWS or GCP plus Kubernetes, including setting up and running containers
- Comfort at the seam between data platforms and product backends, knowing how their operations differ
- Quick, independent execution; the role is hands-on delivery rather than advisory work
Qualifications
- Prior time in financial technology, payments or other regulated product settings
Core Skills
Benefits
- Your own Pleo card for company spending
- Free lunch on work days, either catered or as an allowance that depends on the office you use
- Comprehensive private healthcare, with coverage options that depend on location
- 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays, with extra days in some countries
- Hybrid or fully remote ways of working
- MyndUp access for mental health and wellbeing support, at no cost
- Paid parental leave
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Is the role remote?
The posting lists it as remote. It also says candidates may choose remote, hybrid or office work in any listed location, provided they are based in that country and have work rights there.
Does the company sponsor visas?
No. The posting says sponsorship for work visas is unavailable for this job in any location it lists.
What does the interview process involve?
A 30-minute intro call, an asynchronous coding test with AI assistance allowed, a 60-minute hiring manager interview, and a 75-minute system design round.
When do applications close?
The posting says applications stay open until 08:00 CEST on the 13th of October 2026 and will not be reviewed before the closing date.
Sample Interview Questions
AI-generated questions tailored to this specific role — a preview of the full practice set.