What You’ll Do

• Design and build backend systems: Design, implement, and ship services that power Tembo’s mortgage and savings platform. You’ll write production code throughout the week and take ownership of substantial features and systems.
• Own systems end-to-end: Take responsibility for the systems you work on, including data modelling, implementation, deployment, monitoring, reliability, performance, and ongoing maintenance.
• Turn problems into deliverable work: Work with engineering and product colleagues to turn customer and business problems into practical technical solutions. Break your work into deliverable pieces, provide pragmatic estimates, and surface uncertainty, risks, and dependencies early.
• Automate operational workflows: Work closely with product and operations teams to understand manual processes and build systems that improve efficiency, accuracy, and customer outcomes.
• Improve the codebase: Improve the structure and maintainability of the code you work on. Make pragmatic decisions about technical debt and choose approaches that balance simplicity, reliability, and delivery speed.
• Contribute to engineering quality: Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, and pairing. Share your knowledge and help improve our testing, documentation, observability, and approach to operating production systems.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 6–12 months, you will likely have:

• Designed, built, and launched systems that increase mortgage case throughput
• Delivered automation that removes manual steps from the mortgage workflow
• Built operational tooling used daily by Tembo’s case management teams
• Taken ownership of important parts of the mortgage or savings platform
• Improved the reliability, observability, and maintainability of the services you work on
• Built a strong understanding of the codebase and effective working relationships across engineering, product, and operations
• Delivered substantial work while communicating progress, trade-offs, and risks clearly

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for an experienced engineer who enjoys building systems, taking ownership, and solving problems with others.

You likely have:

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems
• Experience designing, delivering, and owning production systems end-to-end
• Strong experience with Ruby on Rails or a similar backend framework
• Experience working with transactional, financial, or operationally critical systems
• Strong knowledge of data modelling and system design
• Experience operating services in production, including monitoring, debugging, performance, and reliability
• The ability to turn ambiguous requirements into practical technical solutions
• Sound judgement about when to invest in architecture and when to choose a simpler approach
• The communication skills to work effectively with engineering, product, and operations colleagues

We’re particularly interested in engineers who have taken responsibility for how their systems work in production and the outcomes they deliver.

Nice to have

• Experience with payments or financial infrastructure
• Experience building workflow automation systems
• Experience applying AI to operational or customer-facing workflows
• Experience building internal platforms or operational tooling
• Experience with ledger, reconciliation, or audit-sensitive systems
• Experience working in a fast-growing startup or scale-up environment

This Role Might Not Be the Right Fit If

• You’re looking to move away from writing production code
• Your experience is primarily frontend or product-focused full-stack work
• Most of your backend work has involved straightforward CRUD applications
• You prefer fully defined implementation tasks over helping determine the solution
• You haven’t yet had the opportunity to design, deliver, and operate systems end-to-end

Our Tech Stack

Our backend platform is primarily built with:

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• AWS
• OpenTelemetry
• OpenAPI

We value strong engineering fundamentals, sound judgement, and system design ability more than experience with any specific technology.

Why Join Tembo

Your work at Tembo will directly affect how people get onto the property ladder. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and operations on problems that are central to the company’s growth. You’ll have room to influence technical decisions, own meaningful systems, and see the impact of your work on customers and colleagues. This is an opportunity to stay deeply hands-on while building software that makes complex financial processes simpler and more reliable.

Benefits

• Remote-first working
• Private health insurance
• Enhanced parental benefits
• Birthday day off
• Annual international team offsite
• Competitive salary and equity

Our Values

• Find a way: We innovate relentlessly to help customers get onto the property ladder.
• It’s all about the people: Customers, colleagues, and partners are at the heart of everything we do.
• If you don’t like it, change it: We move quickly, listen to feedback, and evolve constantly.

Application

As part of the application process, we’ll ask you to describe a system you have helped design, delivered, and owned in production.

We’ll be particularly interested in your contribution, the decisions you made, the trade-offs you considered, how you worked with others, and what you learned from operating it in the real world.