What You’ll Do

• Build and ship critical systems
  • Design, implement, and operate the backend services that power Tembo’s mortgage and savings platform. You’ll be expected to contribute production code throughout the week and personally own some of our most important technical work.
• Take ownership of the codebase
  • Help maintain the overall health, structure, and direction of the codebase. Identify areas that need improvement, make pragmatic decisions about technical debt, and ensure the platform remains easy to change as the company grows.
• Lead technical execution
  • Work closely with the CTO and Senior Product Manager to turn product priorities into clear technical approaches. Help break complex initiatives into deliverable pieces, identify risks early, and ensure the team has the context needed to execute effectively. Provide pragmatic estimates, surface uncertainty and dependencies early, and help sequence work into achievable milestones.
• Own systems end-to-end
  • Take responsibility for systems from initial design through to production operation, including data modelling, implementation, deployment, monitoring, reliability, performance, and ongoing evolution.
• Shape the architecture
  • Lead architecture discussions and make pragmatic decisions that balance speed, simplicity, reliability, and long-term maintainability. You’ll help establish patterns that allow the engineering team to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.
• Automate operational workflows
  • Work closely with product and operations teams to understand manual processes and build systems that improve efficiency, accuracy, and customer outcomes.
• Support and unblock the team
  • Provide technical guidance through pairing, design reviews, and code reviews. Help engineers navigate difficult decisions and raise the quality of the team’s work without becoming a bottleneck.
• Raise the engineering bar
  • Improve our development practices, observability, testing, documentation, 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 materially increase mortgage case throughput
• Delivered automation that removes manual steps from the mortgage workflow
• Taken ownership of key parts of the mortgage or savings platform
• Shaped the technical approach to major product initiatives alongside the CTO and Senior Product Manager
• Improved the structure, reliability, and observability of critical platform services
• Helped the engineering team make better architectural and implementation decisions
• Established a strong understanding of the codebase and become a trusted technical partner across engineering, product, and operations
• Increased the team’s ability to deliver complex work predictably and with confidence

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for an experienced engineer who enjoys building systems, taking ownership, and helping a team execute at a high level.

You likely have:

• Significant experience building and operating production backend systems
• Experience leading the technical delivery of complex projects while remaining deeply hands-on
• A track record of designing 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, system design, and distributed system fundamentals
• Experience operating services in production, including monitoring, incident response, performance, and reliability
• The ability to turn ambiguous business problems into clear technical plans
• Strong judgement about when to invest in architecture and when to choose a simpler approach
• The communication skills to work closely with engineering, product, operations, and senior leadership

We’re particularly interested in engineers who have taken genuine responsibility for the success of systems and projects, rather than only contributing individual tickets within an existing plan.

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
• You’re primarily interested in people management
• Your experience is mainly frontend or product-focused full-stack work
• Most of your backend work has involved straightforward CRUD applications
• You prefer receiving fully defined requirements rather than 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 have significant influence over both what we build and how we build it. You’ll work closely with the CTO, product, operations, and the wider engineering team on problems that are central to the company’s growth.

This is an opportunity to remain deeply hands-on while taking meaningful ownership of a growing platform, a consequential roadmap, and the technical direction of the engineering team.

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 designed, delivered, and owned in production.

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

No recruiters at the moment please