Backend Product Engineer

What’s Yonder?

“It's as if Time Out, Amex and Monzo had a baby” - Will T, Yonder Member

Yonder combines credit and debit in one membership that’s fair, flexible and actually enjoyable. No jargon. No dusty points system. Just rewards that actually feel rewarding, from bao to beer to a boarding pass.

The engineering team sits at the heart of the company; we work in squads alongside product and design, and closely with risk, compliance, operations and partnerships.

We’re looking for a Product Engineer to join our backend team. You’ll work on the systems that sit behind every Yonder membership: what happens when a member taps their card, our in-house core banking platform, and the rewards engine that makes Yonder different.

You’ll be joining a small engineering team that owns everything end to end: the development lifecycle, system architecture and the infrastructure it all runs on. That means the work you do has a real, visible impact, and you’ll have a hand in shaping how engineering at Yonder evolves.

Your home is the backend, but we don’t believe in rigid boundaries. Everyone here is encouraged to contribute wherever the problem takes them, whether that’s infrastructure, the mobile app or the webapp.

• Develop production-grade backend services powering payments, core banking and rewards.
• Build event-driven features with Kafka and integrate with internal services and external partners.
• Ship features end to end, from concept through to live deployment, with measurable member impact.

• Contribute to the architecture of our distributed microservices, with an eye on resilience, scalability and maintainability.
• Design APIs and data flows that work cleanly with our mobile app.
• Take part in lightweight architecture reviews to share knowledge and shape technical decisions.

• Look after the services you build in production: monitor, troubleshoot and improve them.
• Work on our cloud infrastructure, containerised workloads and CI/CD pipelines.
• Apply good practice for reliability, observability and security across the stack.

• Work closely with product and design to deliver features our members love.
• Pair with other engineers, review code and help raise the team’s technical bar.

• Backend: Scala microservices on the Typelevel ecosystem (Http4s, Cats Effect)
• Data & messaging: AlloyDB (Postgres), managed Kafka
• Infrastructure: GCP, GKE (Kubernetes), Docker
• Frontend: React Native mobile app, Next.js webapp
• AI tooling: AI coding tools are widely used and actively encouraged. Our engineers use Claude Code, Cursor, Git Hub Copilot and Codex day to day.

• Have backend experience in production: You’ve built and run services that real users depend on, ideally in a JVM language (Java, Kotlin, Scala).
• Are curious about functional programming: You like immutable data, strongly typed APIs and code that’s easy to reason about. You don’t need Scala experience; we’ll help you learn it.
• Have worked with event-driven systems: You have experience with Kafka or similar, and understand how event-driven architectures behave in practice.
• Understand distributed systems: You’re comfortable building and operating microservices.
• Own quality: You see automated testing as part of building, not an afterthought.
• Use AI tools well: You use AI to move faster, and you apply the judgement to know when its output is wrong.
• Focus on the customer: You care more about solving member problems than about any particular technology.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity: You’re happy setting your own direction when the path isn’t fully defined.
• Take ownership: You drive work from idea to delivery in a fast-paced startup.
• Have a growth mindset: You’re eager to learn,…