Senior Ruby Engineer

About Cleo

JOIN THE FINTECH THAT’S FIGHTING BACK. Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we fight for the world’s financial health, building a beloved AI that empowers people to make better financial decisions.

We’re more than just a money app or an AI reading a bank balance. Cleo’s on a mission to help millions of people improve their financial health. And relate to them in a way their banks never could.

Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we’ve reached over 4 million users and plan to double that number each year...which is where you come in.

TRANSPARENT SALARIES AND CAREER PROGRESSION

Yep. Salary bands and progression frameworks are open source. You always know where you stand and where to focus.

DIVERSITY

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

The Position

We’re looking for a brilliant senior backend Ruby engineer to join us on our mission to fight for the world's financial health. You’ll be joining a team of adaptable, creative and product-focused engineers who ship working software. We understand our customers, we understand their pain, and we are passionate about helping them.

What you’ll be doing

• Joining a cross-functional product squad with a mix of backend engineers, data analysts, frontend engineers, user researchers, designers, UX writers and others to develop features that improve our users’ financial health.
• Collaborating with other leaders in your squad and pillar to provide technical insight into upcoming feature work, and leading the delivery of work by helping pull everyone together to get it shipped.
• Mentoring your colleagues to help them become the best engineers they can be. You intentionally take time to share your skills and experiences with them and actively support their growth.
• Working on our Ruby on Rails monolith to build out data models, background workers, JSON apis, and business logic services to support those product features.
• Delivering your work wrapped in the tools and techniques we use to let us iterate quickly: tests, observability, AB-tests and feature flags.
• Analysing data, wherever you might find it — querying our postgresql database, investigating our application logs, monitoring our stats and performance metrics, or digging into our quantitative user research data — to detect problems and come up with new ideas.
• Supporting your colleagues by joining our in-hours support rota, and, optionally, joining our compensated out-of-hours on-call rota.
• Getting involved in cross-cutting concerns that lift our entire engineering effort with the rest of the backend chapter.
• Taking part in shaping all the work your squad does, not just the technical parts. Delivery is a team sport, and we encourage everyone at Cleo to share their ideas, so you can expect to be involved in product ideation sessions, user research calls, design reviews, retrospectives, ways of working sessions, product demos, OKR reviews.

Here are some examples, big and small, of the kinds of product feature work our engineers have taken part in over the last year:

• Building a secured credit card from scratch to help our users improve their credit scores without changing their habits.
• Launching our new budget rewind feature to help users understand their pay-cycle and provide them with better analysis of how they got on with their budget.
• Adding discount plans and tiering options to our subscriptions so we can experiment with the best pricing for different types of users.

Whichever squad and part of the business you land in, you will ship changes multiple times a day to our hundreds of thousands of active users and seeing your work having a material impact on the financial health of those most in need.

Requirements

Firstly and most importantly, all of the above sounds exciting to you and you want to make a positive difference in society by improving the financial health of our users worldwide.

You’ve also read our company values and engineering principles which drive our ways of working and help us deliver working software to our users, learn what works and iterate quickly to improve it. You share and embrace these opinions and are passionate about using them to deliver value.

As this is a SE3-SE4 position we’re looking for someone who has strong industry experience of using Ruby on Rails for a minimum of 4 years. If it’s not quite that much, maybe you want to look at our standard Backend role -> https://remotesoftwareengineeringjobs.com/bf303e9763f920429eafe2a6968161c2

Our Hiring Process

TLDR:

1. Phone screen with Talent
2. Technical Discussion
3. Pairing Interview
4. Final Interview/s

INTRO: MEET A TALENT PARTNER ⏰ : 30 MINS

Zoom 💻 or 📱 Phone. We’ll get feedback to you within 1–2 working days.

We’ll cover:

• The role, our company, and our engineering team.
• Your notice period, visa sponsorship/relocation, and salary expectations.
• We’ll make sure your skills and experience meet the requirements for the role.

Preparation:

• Take a look at the Cleo website and get an understanding of what we do.  
• Feel free to prepare some questions.
• Make sure you are free to talk openly in a space with few distractions and a good phone signal/WiFi signal.

STAGE ONE: TECHNICAL DISCUSSION ⏰ : 30 MINS

You’ll speak with two Cleo Engineers about our mission, values, and engineering principles. Our lovely team lead the chat, but we won’t just be listening to your answers -we want to treat it like a conversation and gather more detail with follow-up questions. We’re doing our best to assess your skills and also put you at ease! Like talking to your engineering pals! 😀

We’ll also explore your technical knowledge and ways of working, your previous experience and your alignment with our engineering principles and values.

Preparation:

• Be ready to go deep and technical with your answers. Focus on your impact in the work you talk about, be specific and detailed.
• Read our engineering principles and think about work you’ve done that’s relevant to them even when you didn’t have them. You could also think about how you might have done past projects differently had you had these. 
• Think about times when you’ve demonstrated our values.
• Why are you excited about working at Cleo? Hint: our mission is a big deal.

STAGE TWO: PRACTICAL EXERCISE ⏰ : 90 OR 120 MINS

We have different exercises for Frontend and Backend Engineers, designed so you can show us how you’d work on day-to-day activities at Cleo.

Why a Technical Interview over a Take home Task you ask? We respect your time at Cleo - the last thing anyone wants to do after a long day's graft is work on a project for another company!

The purpose of this session is primarily to assess your technical skills in real time. We're looking to see your coding skills, how you approach problems, how you communicate and explain your decisions.

Don't worry - we don’t just watch! Our Engineers will work together with you on the exercises, so don't be shy - lean on your (potential!) colleagues!

Pair-coding preparation:

• You’ll share your screen for some of the session, so turn on “do not disturb” mode / turn off notifications.
• Make sure you have access to whatever tools you prefer for writing code (e.g. IDE, terminal, editor, etc.).

STAGE THREE ⌚️ : 75 MINS (TOTAL)

Look at that, you're on the home stretch!

The final stage of the interview process typically runs as back to back interviews, giving you another chance to meet some of our wonderful Cleople.

‍Meet the Team - Cross-FX skills and Cleo Values ⏰ : 30 mins

You’ll meet two Cleo people outside of Engineering.

This interview is here to measure how you can work cross functionally, how well you work with others, and one of our values – Bring Good Vibes. Having tangible examples for all of these is an awesome start!

Additionally, this is your chance to talk to Cleo folks outside of the engineering space to get a different perspective of what life is like at Cleo, so make sure you have some questions ready to ask our team!

Preparation:

• Have some questions ready.
• Understand our values give examples of why you’re aligned with them.
• Reflect on what you’ve learned about Cleo so far.

Meet the Engineering Leaders ⏰ : 45 mins

Congratulations on making it to the final stage! You’ll meet an Engineering Leader or two - don't worry, there are no scary leaders here!

This stage of the process is mostly for self-reflection. It’ll give you the opportunity to look back at what you’ve learnt about Cleo throughout the process, and which parts of working at Cleo you particularly resonate with.

Our leaders will look at how you could help move us forward in our mission to fight for the world’s financial health. They’ll also ask some behavioural questions to understand what kind of coaching and support you’d need in the role.

We’ll cover:

• Why you want to join Cleo and your longer-term career aspirations.
• Alignment with our engineering principles and product engineering.
• Your strengths and areas for growth and find out what you’d want to get out of your first week.
• We’ll ask you for feedback on the interview process.

Preparation:

• Read our engineering principles.
• Feedback on our interview process.
• A list of any final questions.

If you have any questions about any stages of the process or feedback, please send them directly to your dedicated Talent Partner at Cleo - we’re here to help! 💙

Benefits

• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
• 401k matching in the US and 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• 2 months paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo!
• Early finish every Friday
• Online courses & internal training to level up your skills
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• Online mental health support via Spill
• Access to Pushfar - online platform for external mentorship
• And many more!