Founding Engineer (Platform)

Department: Engineering

Location: London

Employment Type: FullTime

Join us to build the future of financial advice - personal, accessible, and built for today.

Financial advice has been too expensive, exclusive, and out of reach for too long. At Clove, we’re combining trusted advisers with technology to close the advice gap and help people make smarter decisions with their money. As one of our first hires, you’ll shape how advice works for today - personal, accessible, and built around real lives.

What you’ll do:

• Architect and build Clove’s core backend systems — focused on reliability, auditability, and scale.

• Integrate with external custody, trading, identity, and KYC systems — wrapping them in clean abstractions.

• Design and implement our internal Book of Record, transaction logic, and compliance-sensitive state transitions.

• Build and maintain APIs used by our mobile app, advisor tools, and internal systems — with clear permissions and observability.

• Define the structure of our internal event system and data models that power advice, execution, and audit history.

• Collaborate closely with product, ops, and advisors to ship systems that are safe, understandable, and performant.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, including time at a fintech, bank, trading platform, or financial infrastructure company.

• Strong understanding of core fintech concepts — ledgers, trades, balances, custody, compliance, and audit trails.

• Deep production experience in at least one backend language (e.g. Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Python) — you’ve built real systems with it and can reason deeply about code quality, testing, and architecture.

• Experience integrating third-party systems via API, and designing wrappers to future-proof against vendor lock-in.

• You write secure, well-tested code and think in terms of system integrity, auditability, and fault-tolerance.

• Bonus: experience with Postgres, event-driven systems, background job processing, or workflow orchestration (e.g. Temporal)

Why join now:

1. Help define and build the backend foundation of a next-generation financial institution — from day zero.

2. Join a high-trust, high-context founding team with deep product and design experience.

3. See your work go live quickly — and directly shape the systems that power our users, advisors, and internal team.

Our offer

A chance to join a small, senior team building Clove from the ground up. You’ll have ownership, flexibility, and real impact - backed by trust, momentum, and a mission that matters.

Our process

We keep it simple: real conversations with the founding team, practical exercises if useful, and clarity about what we expect from each other. No hoops for the sake of it.