Staff Engineer - Business Spend

About Pleo Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we’re 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 you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ 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 can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re 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. About the role 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 don’t rush to apply and use the time to submit a high quality application. We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Business Spend segment at Pleo. In this role, you’ll 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 you’re 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! Who you’ll be working with and reporting to You’ll 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. You’ll also have the chance to partner with teams across product, design and compliance to ensure success. What you’ll be doing 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 can’t 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 anyone’s 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, here’s what’s 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. What you bring You’ll thrive in this role if you have: • Strong verbal communication. You can hold a room of engineers who don’t 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 you’re 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 don’t own, with specific examples of when you’ve 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. Why is this role a good fit for you 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 we’re answering it this year. • You want your work to be visible. The team is small enough that one person changes the outcome, and you’ll see the effect on customers within weeks. • You like being the person others come to, and you’d 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. You’ll spend a real share of your time in code you didn’t write, with constraints you didn’t 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. You’ll need to rely on technical influence and earn trust across 3 teams. How you’ll develop in this role 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. We’re 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. We’d 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. Show me the benefits • 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 we’re supportive of families and help you feel that you don’t have to compromise your family due to work The interview process 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: • Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background. • Hiring Manager interview: A 60-minute experience-based conversation to deep dive into technical leadership experience, achievements and complexity you’ve been used to. • Core skills test: A 75-minute system-design interview with two of our engineers to deep dive into your architecture and problem solving skills. • Pleo challenge: A 60-minute presentation interview focusing on discussing one of your previous achievements. • 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 we’re 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 – it’s 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 we’re 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 you’ve 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 requir