Staff Engineer Business Spend

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved not just finance. At Pleo were changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless empowering and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses go beyond.

The word Pleo actually means more than youd expect and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now were at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40000 customers our business and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs who turn complex problems into simple solutions challenge the way things are done (respectfully) and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward we cant say weve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly thats half the fun! What we can say is that were a driven progressive and importantly a kind bunch of 850 people from over 100 nationalities all committed to delivering the future of business spending together.

Please note: applications will be open until Tuesday 13th October 2026 at 08.00 CEST.
We will not review any applications before the closing window so please dont rush to apply and use the time to submit a high quality application.

Were looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Business Spend this role youll help us build invoices purchase orders supplier invoices cards for subscriptions and be part of Business Spend as we scale procurement to pay services. If youre excited about systems with real history and are passionate about building services that handle what a company spends to run itself then this is the opportunity for you!

Youll report to our Engineering Manager in Business Spend and work closely with teams in accounting systems and card infrastructure. Our team of 10 is highly collaborative and dedicated to invoices and vendors. Youll also have the chance to partner with teams across product design and compliance to ensure success.

As a Staff Engineer you will:

• Partner with the Engineering Manager to own and be accountable for the whole architecture of Business Spend.

• Own significant parts of our supplier data migration moving supplier and bank account logic out of a legacy service into a dedicated one per customer and without downtime.

• Improve the reliability of our invoice payment flows where roughly 2.5% of payments currently fail and every failure is a customer who cant pay a supplier.

• Turn our new vendor data model into working software so that a supplier means the same thing across cards invoices and accounting.

• Help the 3 teams make consistent technical decisions through design documents code review and the architecture forum without being anyones manager.

• Raise the people around you through pairing review and writing things down clearly enough that someone in another time zone can act on them.

To put things into context heres whats on our roadmap right now: extracting supplier management out of our legacy invoice service meeting the ISO 20022 structured address requirements for outbound payments and rebuilding how we model suppliers and vendors across the whole of Business Spend.

On the technical side you can expect to work with the following stack: AWS Github actions Kotlin on the JVM Kafka Spring Boot Gradle Kubernetes and Grafana for metrics logs and traces. Our frontend is TypeScript and React.

Youll thrive in this role if you have:

• Strong verbal communication. You can hold a room of engineers who dont share a first language and leave everyone clear on what was decided.

• Experience as the technical lead for a team spread across several countries and time zones. You adapt how you communicate rather than expecting everyone to adapt to you and youre as effective in writing and async as you are live.

• Deep backend engineering experience in a modern statically typed language such as Java Kotlin or TypeScript on systems running in production at scale.

• A track record of shipping inside a legacy system that was being taken apart. Not just designing the target state but doing the migration.

• The ability to change technical direction across teams you dont own with specific examples of when youve done it.

• Writing that other people can act on. Design documents decision records migration plans that work without you in the room.

• A background in payments fintech accounts payable ERP or B2B SaaS.

• Experience with event-driven systems and Kafka and a habit of building observability into what you ship.

This role is a good fit for you if:

• You want to work on a genuinely unsolved problem. How a company models its suppliers across cards invoices and accounting is the hardest open question in our product and were answering it this year.

• You want your work to be visible. The team is small enough that one person changes the outcome and youll see the effect on customers within weeks.

• You like being the person others come to and youd rather earn that through the work than be handed it in a job title.

This role is not a good fit for you if:

• You want a green field project. Youll spend a real share of your time in code you didnt write with constraints you didnt choose.

• You want to design the target state and hand it over. Here you design it and then you build it.

• You need formal authority to get things moving. Youll need to rely on technical influence and earn trust across 3 teams.

In your first 6 months at Pleo you will:

• Take ownership of a major workstream in the supplier migration and carry it to production.

• Work with the Accounts Payable team to improve payment reliability and the observability behind it.

• Build the relationships across all 3 teams that make cross-team technical work possible and grow into a larger share of the architecture direction for Business Spend.

Were committed to helping you develop your career. For this role that means a growing share of technical direction across the segment and a clear conversation about what the next level looks like and what it takes to get there. Wed rather have that conversation early than have you find the answer somewhere else.

Please note: We can hire on a remote hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations.

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)

• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office

• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location coverage options include Vitality Alan or Médis

• 25 days of annual leave public holidays (additional days may apply in select countries based on local standards).

• For our Team we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options

• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far

• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that were supportive of families and help you feel that you dont have to compromise your family due to work

We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful our interview process is as follows:

1. Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background.

2. Hiring Manager interview: A 60-minute experience-based conversation to deep dive into technical leadership experience achievements and complexity youve been used to.

3. Core skills test: A 75-minute system-design interview with two of our engineers to deep dive into your architecture and problem solving skills.

4. Pleo challenge: A 60-minute presentation interview focusing on discussing one of your previous achievements.

5. Final interview: A 45-minute leadership interview assessing your behavioural skills and values.

Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what were looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success!

Last time we hired a Staff Engineer we received a total of 1258 applications but only 8 were selected for an intro call. With this in mind we want to help you understand what we really care about when reviewing your application:

• We receive a lot of CVs and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI - its a big focus for us internally too- but without human intervention these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What were really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you - not AI - know from your previous experience. A top tip from us is to use the Achieved X as measured by Y by doing Z formula (credit: Laszlo Bock 2014) to give a really clear picture of what youve worked on. A final note: including links to your previous companies websites is a huge help and allows us to truly understand your background.

• Every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully they make a huge difference in our decision-making process.

• The Staff seniority level at Pleo requires to have extensive experience operating as a technical lead / owner of initiatives that have cross team / domain impact in SaaS organisations of 500 people. Were also looking for someone with significant experience architecting services across multiple domains (e.g. invoicing subscription cards etc.) and with the ability to decouple complex legacy systems through an effective long-term delivery plan. If you do not have this experience please do not apply. If you do have this experience please ensure your CV truly reflects it.

• English first. Since its our company language please submit your application in English. Youll be using it a lot if you join us.

• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly we only accept applications through our systemour support team cant pass on calls or emails.

• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply even if you dont tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us.

• Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format email Well design a process that works for you.

• Your data is safe. When you apply we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data read our Privacy Policy here.

• Applying for multiple roles Nothing is stopping you and we assess every role independently. However we do look for alignment so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.

• Reapplying. If youre applying for the same role again please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.

Required Experience:

Staff IC