Senior Backend Engineer — Mortgage Platform

About Tembo

At Tembo, we’re building the leading consumer mortgage platform in the UK, helping people buy their first home, remortgage, and move up the property ladder.

Home ownership has become increasingly difficult for many people. Through innovative mortgage products, affordability schemes, and savings tools like our Lifetime ISA and Cash ISA, Tembo helps families who might otherwise be locked out of home ownership.

Our platform powers everything from mortgage discovery through to application submission, alongside savings products that help people build towards buying a home.

We’re rated 4.8★ on Trustpilot, with thousands of customers whose lives have been changed by getting onto the property ladder.

Our biggest challenge this year is scale.

We aim to double the number of mortgage cases we submit without doubling the size of our operations team. Achieving that requires building systems that automate large parts of the mortgage journey — operational tooling, workflow automation, and integrations with lenders and financial partners.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help build the systems that power Tembo’s mortgage and savings platform.

This role focuses on designing and operating systems that automate complex financial workflows, power operational tooling, and support integrations with lenders and partners. The work is primarily backend and platform-focused. Engineers on this team design and own systems end-to-end, from architecture through to production operation.

What Engineers at Tembo Build

Examples of systems engineers on the team work on include: Mortgage workflow automation that moves cases through lender processes with minimal manual intervention Operational tooling used by Tembo’s case management teams Partner integrations with lenders, credit agencies, and financial partners Savings infrastructure powering products such as our Cash ISA and Lifetime ISA Automation systems that remove operational bottlenecks in the mortgage journey

These systems are central to enabling Tembo to scale while maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

Examples of Problems We’re Working On

Increasing mortgage case throughput through workflow automation Designing internal platforms used by operations teams managing large numbers of cases Building reliable integrations with lenders and financial institutions Scaling Tembo’s mortgage platform as customer demand grows Ensuring correctness and auditability in savings products handling real customer funds Improving observability and reliability across the platform

What You'll Do

Design and build backend systems Architect and implement services that power Tembo’s mortgage and savings platform.

Own systems end-to-end Take responsibility for systems from design through to production operation, including monitoring, reliability, and performance.

Automate operational workflows Work closely with product and operations teams to identify manual processes and build systems that improve efficiency.

Scale the platform Build systems capable of supporting rapid growth in customers, partners, and mortgage applications.

Contribute to technical leadership Participate in architecture discussions and help raise the bar for engineering quality across the team.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 6–12 months you will likely have: Designed and launched systems that increase mortgage case throughput Built automation that removes manual steps from the mortgage workflow Delivered operational tooling used daily by Tembo’s case management teams Improved reliability and observability across critical platform services Taken ownership of key parts of the platform

What We're Looking For

We’re looking for engineers who enjoy building and owning systems.

You likely have: 5+ years building and operating production backend systems Experience architecting and owning production systems end-to-end Strong experience with Ruby on Rails or similar backend frameworks Experience working with transactional or financial systems Strong understanding of data modelling and system design Experience operating services in production environments

We’re particularly interested in engineers who have designed and owned production systems end-to-end, rather than only contributing to existing codebases.

Nice to have: Experience with payments or financial infrastructure Experience building workflow automation systems Experience building internal platforms or operational tooling Experience with ledger or reconciliation systems

This role might not be the right fit if: Your experience is primarily frontend or product-focused full-stack work Most of your backend work involves simple CRUD APIs You haven’t yet had the opportunity to design and own 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 and system design more than experience with specific technologies.

Why Join Tembo

Your work at Tembo will directly impact how people get onto the property ladder. Engineers work closely with product, operations, and leadership to build systems that enable the business to scale while improving the experience for customers.

Benefits

Remote-first working Private health insurance Enhanced parental benefits Birthday day off Annual international team offsite (Mallorca this year) 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 candidates to describe a system they’ve designed and owned in production.