Senior Backend Engineer - Customer Operations Platform

Senior Software Engineer - Customer Operations Platform

Hybrid in London, UK
(1-2 days per week)

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer

iwoca’s operational tools and processes are a competitive advantage, allowing us to give great customer service, manage risk, and get money into our customers’ hands as quickly as possible.

You’ll join our growing Customer Operations Platform team to help improve the systems that power these processes, building tailored flows for our Operations teams, automating processes using AI, using ML models to make smarter decisions, and improving the reliability of our communication services.

You’ll work closely with our Operations teams, getting user feedback and input on requirements from users working in the same building, and seeing the impact of your changes on the people you work with.

The company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.

We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The role

As a Senior Engineer you’ll run projects end to end, work out what' s actually needed, design it, build it and look after it in production.

Responsibility and Autonomy:

• Take the lead on complex projects that span many systems and many stakeholders — e.g. CRM, telephony, contact, and task management

• Build a strong understanding of the business context: how our ops teams actually work, how the processes you're automating are supposed to run, and what the people relying on your systems need from them.

• Do the detailed technical scoping and prototyping that tells us whether an idea is feasible before it reaches the roadmap.

Delivery and Collaboration

• Take on complex coding and architecture problems with a high level of ambiguity and technical complexity.

• Write fluent technical documents and developer tickets distilling product requirements into clear and actionable technical work.

• Build relationships with key stakeholders including Operations Strategy, Credit Analysts, Account Managers, and Collections teams.

Learning and Growth:

• Mentor junior developers, fostering a learning environment that encourages experimentation and innovation.

• Embody our growth mindset mentality by sharing new technologies and best practices within the team as well as more broadly across the company.

The projects

Here are some of the most recent problems we are solving:

• iwocaChat. Operations staff spend a large share of their day assembling context from multiple systems before they can help a customer. iwocaChat uses Claude to answer those questions directly, so staff spend their time on the customer rather than the lookup.

• Migrating the monolith. We are incrementally moving business logic out of our Django monolith into smaller, independently deployable services. Because it cuts across every domain, you'd be shaping service boundaries and ownership models that stick around long after the monolith is gone.

• Inbox messaging reworking. We are replacing our third party email inbox application with an inhouse solution, utilising AI to enable operations staff to automate the actions of our most frequent customer service enquiries.
  

The requirements

Essential:

• Experience developing and owning shared back end services that other engineering teams contribute to and depend on - being the trusted reviewer for their contributions and shaping how they build on top of your work.

• Experience building and shaping distributed systems in complex business domains.

• Ability to translate complex operational needs into technical architecture.

• Strong capability using AI tools to automate routine tasks and research, enabling greater focus on complex system architecture and critical technical decision-making.

• You use AI (Cursor, Claude Code or similar) in your daily flow – whether for work or for fun. You use it to blast through boilerplate and research so you can focus on the hard parts: complex architecture, rigour and high-stakes decisions.

Bonus:

• Commercial experience with Python frameworks like Django.

• Familiarity with front-end technologies (React, TypeScript) and browser debugging.

• Experience with complex data architectures, including event-sourced data models.

The salary

We expect to pay from £80,000 - £110,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.

We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a brilliant place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Frankfurt, and Berlin with plenty of drinks and snacks.

• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, yoga classes, football, etc.

The benefits

• Flexible working.

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days’ holiday, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.

• Two company retreats a year, we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links:

• See iwoca benefits & policies for detail and some additional benefits.

• See interview welcome pack to learn more about the process.