About Pleo Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. 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’. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. We will not review any application before the closing date so please use this time to submit a high quality application. We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Data Serving team that owns the production‑grade boundary between Pleo's raw product data and everyone who consumes it, including internal product teams, AI agents, and customers directly accessing their own data. This Senior Backend Engineer role builds and owns that boundary: APIs and the low‑latency serving layer underneath it. You will build customer‑facing infrastructure where contract stability and latency are non‑negotiable, and where the clean abstraction you maintain is what lets every downstream consumer trust the data without ever touching a raw source. You will report to our VP of Data, and work closely with our Staff Data Platform Engineer, Data Engineers, Product Managers and others Engineers across the business. You'll also coordinate closely with the GenAI Platform and Data Infrastructure teams. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will: Build and own the Data API boundary: delivering clean, versioned, and performant endpoints for internal dashboards, customer‑facing features, and third‑party tools (e.g., Design and optimise the read models, indexes, and caching strategies in Postgres (and future OLAP stores) to guarantee low‑latency query performance.



Build reliable integrations with Pleo’s Kotlin‑based product backend services to ensure the serving layer surfaces the correct data required for a customer facing feature. Own the reliability and performance of the services you build: monitoring, incident response, and SLOs appropriate to customer‑facing infrastructure. Partner with Data Engineers to define clean contracts between the ingestion/aggregation layer and the serving DB, ensuring read patterns match storage schemas. Build a near‑real‑time data aggregation service to collect and unify data across Pleo services. Own access control and permission management services, including row and column‑level data access with full audit trails. AWS (product side), GCP (data side), Docker, Kubernetes, BigQuery, PostgreSQL dbt, Kafka, Airflow, Python, Kotlin and more Strong backend engineering experience building and owning reporting and analytics API services and serving‑layer infrastructure. Experience owning API boundary layers including clean endpoint design, versioning, contract stability, and ensuring downstream consumers are never exposed to raw data sources. Strong expertise designing performant read‑heavy systems, including relational database optimisation, indexing strategies, materialised views, caching, and API performance tuning. Solid database fundamentals (SQL and non‑SQL) and strong SQL querying skills, as well as deep expertise in Kafka.



Deep experience with a JVM‑based language (Pleo's product backend is Kotlin‑based). AWS or GCP with Kubernetes experience. Experience working at the boundary between data systems and product backend services, with a real understanding of the operational differences between the two. You understand what it means to design, build and maintain services with high performance, availability and reliability requirements. You have a very deep understanding of the data world and know how to bridge the gap between data and engineering. You will be held accountable for the quality and availability of those services alongside your team. Get deep into the current state: the upstream Kotlin services the serving layer will pull from, the internal consumers already waiting on the API (Data & AI Products, GenAI Platform), and any prototype serving logic that needs to be replaced or formalised. Ship the first production version of the Reporting API (a defined set of endpoints with agreed contracts, versioning, and SLOs) with at least one internal consumer live against it. Establish the access control, tenant isolation, and row/column‑level security model for the API. You will have proven out low‑latency query performance on Postgres, with clear metrics around reliability and SLOs, and established a clear architectural benchmark to understand when (or if) an OLAP layer would ever be necessary. 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. Lunch is

📌 Senior Backend Engineer (Madrid)
🏢 Creandum
📍 Madrid