Senior Software Engineer (Java/Kotlin)

Zopa, Barcelona

Simple loans. Smart investments.

Our Story

We’re empowering people to FeelGood about their money.

We’ve been on this journey since 2004, when we built the first ever peer-to-peer lending company to give people access to simpler, better-value loans and investments. When it comes to money, we think everyone deserves a fair deal, so since we launched, we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of customers to take the stress out of money by building our business on honesty, transparency and trust.

Our journey’s always evolving, and we’ve just launched a bank. But a different type of bank – one that empowers its customers to take control of their finances and FeelGood about their money.

If you embrace being challenged beyond the norm, aren’t afraid to think differently and are motivated by working somewhere you can really make an impact, you’ll love life here at Zopa.

The Challenge:

Zopa’s mission is to create a richer life for everyone by making money fair and simple. We do this by building great financial products, like our award-winning personal loans and our hugely popular investment products. We’ve also just launched a new Credit Card and Savings accounts. These products are underpinned by a business model which means that we win when the customer wins – unlike many other financial products which rely on customers making mistakes or being misinformed to make money.

In 2020 we launched Zopa Bank with cutting edge technologies and are looking for talented mid and senior level Java Software Engineers to work on bringing our products to more and more customers.

The Role:

You will be working in a small, agile and adaptable cross-functional team and utilising Kafka and Kafka Streams to build a resilient, scalable backbone that powers the growth of the company. You can expect to interact with stakeholders and key business users daily. We are big believers in a lean philosophy and flexibility in implementation, while aiming to achieve stack consistency and alignment across the board. All of our JVM infrastructure is deployed with Docker/Kubernetes as often as we need to via CI (Jenkins) and a completely automated test suite.

Here is some of the Tech Stack you will be working with: Java, Kafka, Kotlin , React, React-Native, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, RabbitMQ, AWS Aurora Postgres, Babel just to name a few.

About you:

You love shipping great products, not just writing superb code.
You are a fast learner and enjoy getting stuck into difficult problems
As an engineer, you’re interested in the problem, not just the requirements.
You feel comfortable in a fast-moving environment and are ambitious about the speed and quality of your code. We ship our code multiple times a week with the impact measured in the result for the customer, not lines of code.
An advocate of test driven development or, even better, behaviour-driven development. A strong commitment to quality is essential.
You've worked on large scale distributed software systems that have proven scalability and complex topologies.
Enjoy talking to key stakeholders and understand and show passion for the business objectives of the company.
You are comfortable with a fair bit of uncertainty, fast change, and love solving hard problems collaboratively.
You are a team player who thrives working in an honest and friendly working atmosphere. We have a flat hierarchy and give you the opportunity to make a real impact.
Experience with Kafka and/or a streams-based platform (Samza, Storm) is a plus!

Here are some of the Projects you could expect to be working on:

Building a new Credit Card platform for the modern age. We’ve just launched a new credit card product built on our own tech. You could take part in scaling it to more customers, solve some difficult performance problems when authorising transactions, or work on exciting new features.
New micro-services: re-writing specific parts of our previous infrastructure into the new micro-services communicating through Kafka.
Building Open Banking products from scratch. This ranges from verifying the income and identity of a customer in a few seconds over assessing credit risk in a new and fairer way to providing savings and lending insights to customers in our app. This is a nascent technology where you have the freedom to create products from scratch, use cutting edge technology and shake up an old industry.
Personal Finance Management feature or system. This might be a new way of verifying income, a budgeting service, or a new API to drive insights for customers. Whatever it is, you will be heavily involved from understanding the space and opportunity all the way to developing the release-ready code and seeing it through to launch and maintenance.
Building a new Credit Card billing and statement generation engine, a card specific origination pipeline or integrating with third party processing and fraud prevention partners to enable a card that can work seamlessly and securely. Whatever it is, you will be heavily involved from understanding the space and opportunity all the way to developing the release-ready code and seeing it through to launch and maintenance.
Pioneering a digital, customer-centric car finance solution, to disrupt a broken and unfair market where paper contracts and scanners are still the norm. Responsibilities range from building out a highly automated quotation and reservation pipeline, to developing new microservices to support a greenfield, end-to-end dealer product.
Building our own internal services to coordinate how our consumer products (like loans or savings accounts) can manage sending and receiving money. It covers a range of payment channels – Faster Payments, Direct Debits, debit cards to name a few. This comes with plenty of technical challenges to make sure our services are easy to use, flexible enough to work for any product, but allow for operational scale: growth in volumes, growth in the range of products, employing a distributed architecture, and increasing the variety of payment channels with which we want to integrate.

This is a fully remote role.

However you must be based in Spain to be considered.

Click here to check out what our engineers have to say about our tech stack, what it’s like to work here and what they enjoy most about their jobs!

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To thrive here, you’ll need to:

Champion our customers. Whatever your role, you’ll be close to our customers. We care passionately about doing the best for them.

Help us make fearless choices. Our environment is fast-paced, agile and open. You’ll solve interesting and challenging problems, and be trusted and empowered to bring your ideas to life.

Walk the talk. Like us, you’ll be honest, stick to your promises and face the tough moments head-on.

Win smarter. You’ll be always on the lookout for a better way of doing things, going beyond ‘good enough’ and welcoming different points of view.

Be in it together. You’ll join an ambitious, diverse and all-round approachable team with a mix of ideas and talents who inspire each other to be better every day.

Zopa is proud to offer a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds leads to great products and unique company culture. We simply can’t expect to empower our customers to better manage their money without challenging the current status quo. Creating the best place for money is no easy task, which is why we need talent from all walks of life.

About Zopa

About us Simple loans. Smart investments. We believe a loan should be there to help you, not hold you back. And an investment should be rewarding, but also ethical. We're shaping the future of finance by offering competitive rates, flexible and intuitive products and award-winning customer service. We exist to make money simple and fair for everyone – to enable people to do more with their money and take control of their finances.