Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team

Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team Hybrid in London, UK We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Operations Tech team. You’ll influence the technical direction of iwoca’s in-house CRM and build parts of it yourself – the system that hundreds of staff across sales, account management, credit, and collections use to give our customers five-star service. 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 team The Operations Tech team builds the tools iwoca’s UK operations teams use every day: the CRM, and the systems behind phone calls, emails, notifications, and task management. Those tools are a competitive advantage – they help colleagues manage risk and enable the outstanding customer service that sets iwoca apart. The team works closely with the Operations Strategy team, which sets operational priorities and scopes much of the tooling. Many of its users work in the same building, and you’ll see how your changes affect the people you work with. We’re growing the team to ten engineers (including this role), two of them tech leads, and two product owners. Most of its time goes on quarterly roadmap projects, alongside a support rota, and regular small feature improvements. The role As a staff backend engineer, you’ll take whole projects end to end: work out what operations teams need, design it, build it, and look after it in production. You’ll decide with the tech leads where the CRM’s service boundaries sit and how to model each domain’s data. You’ll judge your work by what it changes for those teams and their customers. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with no line management, but you’ll mentor the engineers around you. You’ll often pair with a more junior engineer, share what you know, and set the standards the team works to through design discussions and code review. You’ll learn how iwoca lends, from credit decisions to collections and financial crime. The team is adding AI to the CRM’s workflows, and you’ll have a say in where it helps. Live project examples: Migrating the monolith. Moving CRM functionality out of iwoca’s Django monolith into separate services, such as customer contact and phone calls, that deploy and scale on their own. Building customer-facing AI agents to take the load off our teams as we grow, and the infrastructure to make them reliable and trustworthy Improving our onboarding journey to so that there’s less manual work getting a customer their funds, for example using LLMs to speed up compliance checks Credit card operations. Building the CRM services that let operations teams support customers on iwoca’s business credit card. iwocaChat. Extending the Claude-powered assistant that answers operations staff questions about a customer, using data held across several systems. The requirements Essential: System design. You’ve designed large production systems and the domain models at their core, and changed their architecture while people relied on them. Backend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You’ve written and run backend services in it. Technical leadership. You’ve led technical decisions across a team as an individual contribut