Principal Backend Engineer

Hello. We’re Teya.

Teya was founded on a simple belief: local businesses deserve better.

They are the cafés, restaurants, salons, shops and entrepreneurs that bring character to our high streets, create jobs and keep communities moving. Yet for too long, financial services has made life harder for them - with clunky tools, poor support and complexity that gets in the way of running a business.

Teya exists to change that.

We’re building a financial platform for local businesses across Europe - one built around simple tools, thoughtful design and real human support. Our Members rely on us to help them run their business with confidence, and that responsibility shapes the way we work.

We move fast. We care about quality. We stay close to the detail. And we believe great performance and genuine hospitality should go hand in hand.

If you want to build meaningful products, solve real problems and make a genuine difference for local businesses, we’d love to hear from you

Your Mission

Small businesses are the backbone of our communities — yet they remain underserved by traditional banks and legacy payment providers. As a Principal Backend Engineer, you will play a defining role in changing that.

Your mission is to design and build the resilient, scalable fintech infrastructure that underpins our most critical business initiatives. This isn’t about owning a single service — it’s about owning outcomes. You will drive the technical success of the platforms that power payments, merchant onboarding, transaction processing, and operational workflows across Europe.

You’ll operate at the intersection of engineering and business strategy, shaping systems that must be secure, compliant, highly available, and capable of scaling with rapid growth. The decisions you make will directly influence how quickly we can launch new products, enter new markets, and serve thousands of merchants.

This role goes beyond technical leadership. You will define and evolve the architectural foundations that multiple teams depend on, bringing clarity to ambiguity and ensuring our most important initiatives succeed.

What You’ll Do

Own and drive the architecture behind our most critical platforms, ensuring they scale with the business and unlock new capabilities

Design and evolve high-scale, cloud-native systems powering payments and merchant experiences

Lead the development of resilient, secure, and compliant services for high-volume transaction processing

Shape and drive adoption of modern backend practices (Java 17/21, Spring Boot 3, Kotlin, clean architecture)

Architect event-driven systems (Kafka) that enable scalable, decoupled domains across teams

Define and enforce standards for API-first development (REST/gRPC) and domain-driven design (DDD)

Set the bar for availability, performance, fault tolerance, and observability across critical systems

Partner deeply with Product, Data, and leadership to translate business priorities into scalable technical strategy

Lead cross-organisational initiatives that are essential to company growth and market expansion

Influence engineering direction through hands-on contribution, design leadership, and mentorship

Bring structure to ambiguity across technical, regulatory, and operational domains