We are looking for a Software Engineer (L4) to join our KYC & AML team (Know Your Customer & Anti-Money Laundering), a key part of the Payments Group at Spendesk. As a technical leader on this highly skilled and collaborative team, you will drive the technical strategy for our mission critical end-to-end compliance infrastructure. This is an exciting opportunity to work at the heart of our financial infrastructure, leading the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and reliable systems to manage customer due diligence, risk assessment, transaction monitoring, and regulatory reporting.

The Payments Group oversees all money movement across Spendesk, including card issuance, wire transfers, balance management, and transaction processing. As Spendesk operates as a regulated Financial Services Institution, this team plays a vital role in ensuring compliance, security, and operational reliability.

In the KYC & AML team, you will lead cross-team initiatives and collaborate closely with Compliance teams, Risk & Operations, regulatory bodies, and other internal stakeholders to ensure we provide the best-in-class compliance experience — while driving technical excellence and maintaining the highest standards of system reliability and scalability.

This role offers leadership opportunities across the full software development lifecycle in a highly regulated environment, with significant influence over technical direction and cross-team project delivery.

Our stack

• Backend: Node.js (TypeScript)
• Frontend: React/Redux
• Datastores: PostgreSQL, Redis
• Infrastructure: Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS (Lambdas, Step Functions)
• Messaging and Queueing: SQS, Kafka, AWS EventBridge
• CI/CD: AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions
• Testing: Node test runner, Jest, Cypress

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architecture of core components of Spendesk's KYC & AML infrastructure, including customer screening systems, integrating with third-party compliance tools for entity verification and monitoring, and providing compliance data via secure APIs
• Drive technical decisions and justify technology choices for secure and efficient APIs supporting KYC workflows, AML monitoring processes, and regulatory reporting flows
• Identify and solve complex technical problems across multiple teams, leading cross-team initiatives to improve compliance infrastructure
• Lead technical discovery and collaborate with the Product Manager to influence product direction and contribute to strategic technical design discussions around compliance workflows
• Mentor junior engineers and guide technical decisions across the team, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and testing standards
• Design and implement monitoring and alerting systems to ensure regulatory compliance reliability and proactively address compliance issues
• Lead code reviews and drive engineering best practices within the team and across related teams
• Take ownership of project management responsibilities including prioritisation, breakdown, and risk management for delivering complex technical solutions
• Act as a technical advisor to management on compliance infrastructure topics and influence technical roadmap decisions

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, with demonstrated technical leadership in backend development
• Expert-level experience with Node.js and TypeScript in production environments, with strength in multiple technologies
• Proven track record of building and maintaining REST APIs in high-availability environments and designing moderately complex systems
• Deep understanding of event-driven architecture and ability to guide system integrations across multiple teams
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and relational database design (PostgreSQL preferred), with system design expertise
• Strong experience writing comprehensive tests and leading CI/CD pipeline improvements
• Proven ability to collaborate and influence across engineering, product, compliance, and operations teams
• Extensive experience implementing and deploying applications on cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) with architectural decision-making capabilities
• Recognised expertise in the compliance/fintech domain or strong ability to quickly become a domain expert
• Mentoring experience and sought after as a technical advisor by peers
• Fluent in English (spoken and written) — it's our business language

Nice to have

• Leadership experience with React and frontend development across teams
• Deep understanding of regulated financial environments or payment service providers
• Advanced experience with AWS services including SQS, Lambda, Step Functions, CodePipeline and ability to make architectural decisions
• Expert knowledge of Kubernetes, Terraform or Kafka with ability to guide technology choices
• Strong systems observability expertise, ideally with Datadog and ability to design monitoring strategies
• Proven system design skills, with demonstrated ability to design for scalability, fault tolerance, and high performance across multiple teams
• Strong track record of leading technical projects and mentoring engineers across multiple teams
• Experience presenting technical concepts to non-technical audiences and conducting presentations across the engineering function

As we are an international team, please submit your application and CV in English.

About Spendesk
Spendesk is the AI-powered spend management and procurement platform that transforms company spending. By simplifying procurement, payment cards, expense management, invoice processing, and accounting automation, Spendesk sets the new standard for spending at work. Its single, intelligent solution makes efficient spending easy for employees and gives finance leaders the full visibility and control they need across all company spend, even in multi-entity structures. Trusted by thousands of companies, Spendesk supports over 200,000 users across brands such as SoundCloud, Gousto, SumUp, and Bloom & Wild. With offices in the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany, Spendesk also puts community at the heart of its mission.

For more information: www.spendesk.com/press

About our people & culture
We believe that people do their best work when they’re given the freedom to thrive and grow. That’s why liberation is at the core of everything we do. We empower Spendeskers to take ownership of their work, to navigate ambiguity, and seize every opportunity. Spendeskers come from all over the world (35+ countries and counting!) but we have plenty in common: we're bold, ever-curious, committed to kindness, and tackle every challenge with a positive mindset.

About our benefits
Our culture is built on trust, empowerment, and growth — with benefits to match!

• Flexible on-site and remote policy
• Fully covered Oyster card for traveling to and from our new office (up to £250 monthly depending on location
• £45 monthly wellness allowance, accruable, to be used on whatever wellness means to you - through the Ben platform
• Access to Moka.care for emotional and mental health wellbeing
• Pension scheme (on salary sacrifice): 5% employee / 5% employer (by Aviva)
• 28 days of holidays
• Latest Apple Mac equipment 
• Company virtual events
• Visit our other offices: Paris, Berlin & Hamburg
• Great office snacks to fuel your day
• Vitality private health insurance (for you and your family/partner)
• Bupa private dental care
• A positive team to work with daily!

Diversity & Inclusion

At Spendesk, we're committed to fostering an environment where all differences are encouraged, supported and celebrated. We're building our culture for everyone, with everyone. Our goal is to attract and build a diverse, equal and inclusive team, where everyone feels welcome and we truly embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.