Senior Software Engineer (Platform) -London

About ARQ

ARQ is one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world. Our mission is to redefine how people interact with money across borders, building the infrastructure to move value seamlessly. We’re still early in our journey, which means every person who joins shapes the future of our product, culture, and growth. If you’re excited by big challenges, global impact, and the chance to grow fast with a world-class team, ARQ is the place to do it.

 

What we're looking for

We’re looking for a world-class, hands-on Senior/Lead Software Engineer to join our Platform team who takes a software engineer’s approach to architecting and building engineering infrastructure.

Our engineering culture is focused on fully type-safe, declarative & testable infrastructure as code and we’re looking for like-minded engineers who also value these properties to join us.

The ideal candidate will have a raw passion for programming, a broad knowledge base and the ability to dig deeply into any technical area required to enable our product engineering team to deliver the best product on the market for managing modern finances.

We architect extreme-quality, automated systems to orchestrate hundreds of backend services & databases across tens of kubernetes clusters, tens of thousands of data processing jobs and tens of thousands of CI/CD builds per week - if that excites you, we want to talk to you.

 

What you'll be doing

• The design and implementation of the secure, highly-available infrastructure layer that powers a modern, high-growth, financial services company.

• Ensure our product engineering organisation can spin up new infrastructure in an unimpeded and rapid manner, through the careful design and implementation of shared IaC libraries, cli tools and codebase patterns.

• Problem-solve, analyse and debug infrastructure issues & opportunities with members of the wider engineering team.

• Strategise & execute on the rollout techniques for making sweeping infrastructure changes as we constantly integrate new best practices & security improvements into our setup.

• Orchestrate multi-region infrastructure and deployments to meet security, availability and compliance requirements.

• Build, maintain & optimise high-volume CI infrastructure, along with reusable pipeline templates suitable for a microservices architecture.

• Implement GitOps workflows for declarative application deployments.

• Improve application monitoring and alerting with Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana.

 

What you'll need

Required Experience

• Software Engineering Foundation: Strong background in full-cycle software development. You should be as comfortable building a customer-facing API as you are provisioning a Kubernetes cluster.

• System Design: Experience driving the architecture and implementation of large-scale, distributed production systems.

• Strong Programming Skills: Fluent in at least one modern typed language (e.g., TypeScript, Go, Rust, or Java). We write code, not just config.

• Modern Infrastructure Stack : Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, CI/CD, and sophisticated IaC (Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK).

• Security Mindset: Deep understanding of modern cyber-security attack vectors and how to bake "secure-by-default" patterns into the platform.

Nice to Have

• TypeScript Fluency: Experience with TypeScript and sophisticated type systems to ensure infrastructure safety.

• Fintech Expertise: Experience working within regulated environments or high-compliance industries.

• Data Infrastructure: Familiarity with scaling data engineering pipelines and distributed databases.

• GitOps: Experience with ArgoCD or Flux for declarative, state-driven deployments.

What We Value

• Systems thinking - understanding how distributed systems work end-to-end

• Problem-solving - methodical debugging of complex infrastructure issues

• Collaboration - working with engineering teams to understand their needs

• Documentation - clear runbooks, technical documentation, and knowledge sharing

• Pragmatism - balancing technical excellence with practical delivery

Benefits

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience

• Sign-on stock options bonus

• Discretionary performance bonus (stock options)

• Paid annual leave

• Own the platform that directly impacts customer experience

• Work with modern DevOps practices and cutting-edge technology

• Strong team focused on continuous learning and knowledge sharing

• Influence technical direction and architecture decisions