Senior Product Engineer (Greenfield Project)

About Marshmallow

We build financial products that accelerate the economic freedom for people who move across borders. We started with car insurance - insuring over a million drivers - and we're scaling beyond. Tens of millions of people move countries each year, facing overlooked financial challenges. Our future is in building financial products around their needs to positively impact their lives.

How we work

We're really proud of the culture we've created. We push for progress every day, because we know that we'll only hit big milestones by taking lots of smaller steps. We're always open to helping our team mates, sharing our ideas, experience and knowledge to solve problems together. We take risks, think creatively and experiment relentlessly to meet our customer's needs, and never pass blame when things go wrong. We encourage people at all levels to take ownership of their work, and to be bold in challenging how we do things. Everyone has a voice and the opportunity to make an impact.
And autonomy and ownership are only possible with clear direction. That's why we collaborate to do in-depth planning twice a year, and make sure we leave with clear goals and objectives that flow from top to bottom. To make sure we're as aligned as possible across functions, most of our work rolls up into three tribes; Acquisition, Retention & Claims. Each tribe has multiple teams embedded in it, working cross-functionally to do great work.
We're so excited for all of the challenges up ahead, and we need more people to help us tackle them! If life at Marshmallow sounds like it could be for you, explore our Culture Handbook to find out more.

Engineering at Marshmallow

Our engineers are at the heart of our solutions. They work on product builds from start to finish, solving lots of challenges to help us build fast and scale up! Our engineers cover a range of skills across frontend, backend, full stack and work alongside designers, data scientists and product managers.

What You'll Work On

This is a unique opportunity to make a large customer-centric impact working on a brand-new greenfield product offering for Marshmallow, focused on solving a really key problem for our customer base. Moving to the UK typically costs thousands of pounds, and often people feel unfairly treated because they struggle to get equal access to financial services. Having made a huge impact in car insurance, our attention is now on helping people who have moved to the UK get fairer access to lending products - starting with car finance. Our Talent Acquisition team can share more specifics about the product during your initial call. You'll also report directly to our co-founder and Chief Architect, as he's personally overseeing the launch of this product.

We're looking for engineers who can work well in ambiguity, work autonomously with a self-starter attitude, and apply their excellent skills and experience to make sensible trade-offs for learning and fast iterative product delivery. You will be embedded in a completely new team within Marshmallow who will be close-knit, highly collaborative, and impact-focused. We're a team of ten highly motivated people, five of whom are engineers, and we work mostly independently from the wider company (operating as a startup within a scaleup). We support one another to get the best outcomes and to build the right solutions.

This role requires autonomy, drive, curiosity and collaboration.

What you'll be doing

• Working in a new team launching a brand new product, which will have a real impact on our customers' lives.
• Contribute to building solutions to ambiguous product problems with an appropriate sense of urgency to deliver impact within the team.
• Creating and promoting efficiency and speed within the team by autonomously solving problems, designing and implementing effective solutions.
• Partnering with stakeholders to understand requirements, build solutions, deliver functionality, write automation tests and build continuous delivery pipelines all the way through to deployment, monitoring and supporting these systems in production.
• Help us evolve our architecture to optimise for simplicity and product delivery speed.
• You'll have the opportunity to mentor other engineers and grow your own skills through influence on important strategic product decisions.
• Growth opportunities for the right candidate could lead to Technical Lead and Staff Engineer opportunities within Marshmallow.

What we're looking for from you

• 4+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience with developing distributed systems.
• Commercial experience with a cloud provider (specifically with AWS is a bonus).
• Commercial experience with IaC, such as Terraform.
• Experience with event-driven architectures is a bonus.
• You are a self-starter who likes to take ownership.
• You are organised and can be relied upon to get things done.
• You work with a sense of urgency, but exercise good judgment on where speed matters.
• We work highly collaboratively and believe that exceptional outcomes come from exceptional people who work closely together and can rapidly innovate and iterate on greenfield projects. In practice, this means that we are typically in the office three to four days a week, with a minimum of three days.

Our Tech Stack

• Java 24.
• Spring Boot 3.
• AWS: (RDS, ECS Fargate, S3, KMS, IAM, VPC, Kinesis, SQS, SNS).
• IaC with Terraform.
• Snowflake.
• CI/CD with TeamCity.
• Docker.
• Observability with Datadog and Sentry.

Perks of the job

• Sabbatical Leave - Get a 4-week fully paid sabbatical after being with us for 4 years
• Competitive bonus scheme - designed to reward and recognise high performance
• Flexible benefits budget - £50 per month to spend on a Ben Mastercard meaning you get your own benefits budget to spend on things you want. Whether that's subscriptions, night classes (puppy yoga, anyone?), the big shop or a forest of houseplants. Pretty much anything goes.
• Learning and development - personal budget for books and training courses to help you grow in your role and 2 learning days a year - on us! - to further your skillset
• Mental wellbeing support - Access therapy and mental health sessions through Oliva
• Private health care - Enjoy all the benefits Vitality has to offer, including reduced gym memberships and discounts on smartwatches
• Medical cash plan - To help you with the costs of dental, optical and physio (plus more!)
• Tech scheme - Get the latest tech for less

Plus all the rest; 33 days holiday (including bank holidays), pension, cycle to work scheme, monthly team socials and company-wide socials every month!

Our Process

We break it up into 3 stages:

• Initial video call with a Tech Talent Acquisition Partner (30 mins)
• A behaviour culture and past experience interview with our Chief Architect to check that your ways of working align with our processes, mission and values (1 hour)
• Tech interview with two members of our backend engineering team, which is centred around systems design and technical questions (1 hour 30 minutes)

We'll let you know if you're invited to an interview or not. But, as a small team with a lot of applications to consider, we can't give individual feedback on each application

Background checks

To meet our regulatory obligations as an FCA-authorised financial services company, we need to do some background checks on all new hires. That means carrying out a DBS check and making sure you don't have any live criminal proceedings. Feel free to ask our Talent Acquisition team if you have any questions about this!

Everyone belongs at Marshmallow

At Marshmallow, we want to hire people from all walks of life with the passion and skills needed to help us achieve our company mission. To do that, we're committed to hiring without judgement, prejudice or bias.

We encourage everyone to apply for our open roles. Gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or background does not affect how we process job applications.

We're working hard to build an inclusive culture that empowers our people to do their best work, have fun and feel that they belong.

Recruitment privacy policy

We take privacy seriously here at Marshmallow. Our Recruitment privacy notice explains how we process and handle your personal data. To find out more please view it here.