{"id":4275316,"url":"https://alion.io/job/iwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team","title":"Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team","company":{"id":6070,"name":"iwoca","domain":"iwoca.co.uk","url":"https://alion.io/company/iwoca","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":9,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.778,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":100000,"max":130000,"currency":"GBP","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":171684},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Celery","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Django","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Twilio","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-13T14:24:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-13","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T18:48:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Staff Backend Engineer - Operations Tech Team\nHybrid in London, UK\nWe’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Operations Tech team.\nYou’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.\nThe company\nSmall 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.\nThat'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.\nWe’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.\nThe team\nThe 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.\nThe 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.\nWe’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.\nThe role\nAs 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.\nThis 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.\nYou’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.\nLive project examples:\nMigrating 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.\n\nBuilding customer-facing AI agents to take the load off our teams as we grow, and the infrastructure to make them reliable and trustworthy\n\nImproving 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\n\nCredit card operations. Building the CRM services that let operations teams support customers on iwoca’s business credit card.\n\niwocaChat. Extending the Claude-powered assistant that answers operations staff questions about a customer, using data held across several systems.\n\nThe requirements\nEssential:\nSystem design. You’ve designed large production systems and the domain models at their core, and changed their architecture while people relied on them.\n\nBackend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You’ve written and run backend services in it.\n\nTechnical leadership. You’ve led technical decisions across a team as an individual contributor, and helped other engineers grow through code reviews and design sessions.\n\nOperational problems. You’ve worked with non-technical colleagues to understand a problem they had, and built the system that solved it.\n\nAI leverage. You’ve built agentic workflows, or used AI to scale your engineering output beyond what you could deliver alone. You judge when to use it and when not to, and you check its output before it reaches production.\n\nCommunication. You write and speak clearly, directly, and concisely. You adapt technical detail to your audience.\n\nBonus:\nPython stack. You’ve worked with Python, Django, Celery, and PostgreSQL.\n\nFull-stack. You’ve contributed to frontend codebases, particularly in React or TypeScript.\n\nMonolith migration. You’ve moved functionality out of a large monolith into separate services, while both stayed in production.\n\nAsynchronous systems. You’ve built services that communicate through message queues such as RabbitMQ.\n\nContact systems. You’ve worked on telephony, email, or messaging systems, such as Twilio.\n\nModels in production systems. You’ve built systems that use model outputs to make operational decisions, such as which work to prioritise.\n\nThe salary\nWe expect to pay from £100,000 to £130,000 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.\nThe culture\nAt 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.\nWe'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.\nThe offices\nWe put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:\nOffices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.\n\nEvents and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.\n\nThe benefits\nFlexible working hours.\n\nMedical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.\n\nA private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.\n\n25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.\n\nA one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.\n\nInstant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.\n\n3% Pension contributions on total earnings.\n\nAn employee equity incentive scheme.\n\nGenerous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.\n\nElectric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.\n\nTwo company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.\n\nAnd to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:\nA learning and development budget for everyone.\n\nCompany-wide talks with internal and external speakers.\n\nAccess to learning platforms like Treehouse.\n\nUseful links:\niwoca benefits & policies\n\nInterview welcome pack (TAP)","description_format":"text","description_chars":7376,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Annual leave","Equity","Flexible schedule","Gym membership","Health insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Business & SME Lending"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-13T18:48:37Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"GB","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"Licensed UK visa sponsor (Skilled Worker)","filings_12m":null,"filings_prev_12m":null,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"Skilled Worker","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-13T08:07:55+00:00","sources":["UK Home Office: register of licensed sponsors (workers)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":52,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-13T20:44:21Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":171684,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/iwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/iwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-13T20:44:21Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":41305,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6070},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6070"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fiwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fiwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fiwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/iwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fiwoca-staff-backend-engineer-operations-tech-team"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4275316}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"iwoca.co.uk","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4275316},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}