Principal Engineer, Payments New United Kingdom

At Tide, we are building a finance platform designed to save small businesses time and money. We provide our members with business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of connected administrative solutions from invoicing to accounting.

Launched in 2017, Tide is now used by over 1 million small businesses across the world and is available to UK, Indian and German SMEs. Headquartered in central London, with offices in Sofia, Hyderabad, Delhi, Berlin and Belgrade, Tide employs over 2000 employees.

Tide is rapidly growing, expanding into new markets and always looking for passionate and driven people. Join us in our mission to empower small businesses and help them save time and money.

Tide's Banking & Payments domain is responsible for building and maintaining the financial infrastructure that enables our members to send, receive, and manage money securely. Our mission is to provide small businesses with seamless, scalable, and secure banking solutions that support their growth.

The domain consists of multiple cross-functional product engineering teams, each focused on specific areas of payments and banking. As we continue expanding into new markets, we are enhancing our payments capabilities by integrating with global banking partners, payment processors, and open banking APIs. Our teams operate in a modern microservices architecture, ensuring high availability, scalability, and resilience.

As a Principal Engineer, you will be a technical leader, playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of Tide's payments platform. Managing the Engineering Managers (EMs) within the domain, this role is focused on technical leadership, architecture, and engineering strategy.

As a Principal Engineer you will:

• Define and drive the architectural direction for Tide's payments systems, ensuring scalability, resilience, and compliance.
• Lead the design and development of real-time, high-volume payment processing solutions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Compliance, Business) to enhance Tide's payments offerings.
• Integrate with third-party providers, including banks, payment processors, and open banking APIs.
• This is a technically hands-on role. Get directly involved in your architecture, providing hands-on technical guidance, ensuring best practices in software engineering, security, and system design.
• Manage and mentor engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.

This role offers the opportunity to influence the entire banking and payments portfolio, drive innovation, and shape Tide's payments strategy as we scale globally.

We are seeking a highly technical and strategic engineering leader with deep expertise in payments systems, fintech, and distributed architectures.

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 5 years in payments.
• Expertise in real-time payments, card processing, open banking APIs, and regulatory frameworks.
• Strong experience with microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed computing.
• Proficient in Java 17, relational databases, and modern cloud-native development, with expertise in designing scalable, low-latency financial systems.
• Hands-on experience designing fault-tolerant, high-availability architectures for payments.
• Proven ability to deliver 3rd party integrations, including influencing the provider's delivery and roadmaps.
• Ability to translate strategic goals into a clear technical roadmap and effectively communicate the "why" behind technical decisions.

Our teams build loosely coupled microservices, enabling fast, autonomous development. Our architecture prioritizes scalability, security, and resilience, ensuring seamless financial transactions.

We use:

• Messaging: Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS

Our location-specific employee benefits are designed to cater to the unique needs of Tideans:

• Flexible working options
• Share options
• Group Life Insurance
• Vitality Health Insurance, with a proactive focus on mental and physical wellbeing
• 25 days holiday with the ability to buy extra days
• 3 days for L&D or volunteering time off per year
• We invest in your development with a £1,000 professional L&D budget per year
• Access to 'salary sacrifice' benefits such as Cycle to Work scheme and pension contribution
• Spacious brand-new office near Old Street with an all-day snacks bar
• Enhanced family-friendly leave
• Sabbatical leave

At Tide, we champion a flexible workplace model that supports both in-person and remote work to cater to the specific needs of our different teams.

While remote work is supported, we believe in the power of face-to-face interactions to foster team spirit and collaboration. Our offices are designed as hubs for innovation and team-building, where we encourage regular in-person gatherings to foster a strong sense of community.

At Tide, we believe that we can only succeed if we let our differences enrich our culture. Our Tideans come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. We consider everyone irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity or differently-abled status. We celebrate diversity in our workforce as a cornerstone of our success. Our commitment to a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds is what enables us to build products that resonate with our members' diverse needs and lives.

We are One Team and foster a transparent and inclusive environment, where everyone's voice is heard.