[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer @First Circle

Role Description

We are now hiring senior developers to drive meaningful impact during our most ambitious year of growth to date.

• Build and evolve backend services and APIs that are fast, reliable, and easy to change.
• Take features from first idea to production: shape the approach with product and design, ship it, measure what happens, and improve it.
• Help make architectural decisions, write clear technical proposals, and balance speed with solutions that will hold up over time.
• Keep your services running smoothly by setting up clear ways to spot issues early, respond quickly, and support users when something goes wrong.
• Review code, share what you know, and help other engineers grow.
• Work across product, design, and business to turn real needs into practical technical solutions—and explain the trade-offs clearly.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems in Kotlin, Java, or Ruby.
• Strong foundations in API design, relational databases, and data modeling, with a clear sense of how to keep data consistent as systems scale.
• Experience in a startup environment, fintech, payroll, payments, or banking is a strong plus (especially if you’ve shipped products in regulated environments).
• Hands-on experience running services in production: debugging effectively, investigating incidents, and making systems more resilient afterwards.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities can evolve.
• Curiosity about AI and practical experience using it, whether you're building LLM-powered features or using AI tools to work more effectively day to day.

Benefits

• No fixed budget, we hire globally and adjust offers based on experience and market rate.
• Primarily remote, with the option to work from our office. We have offices in London, Hong Kong, Singapore & Belgrade where other senior engineers are based.
• Macbooks, private health insurance, training budgets and more!
• Opportunity to travel to South East Asia.

Company Description

First Circle is an SME-focused, credit-centric, and multi-product NeoBank in SE Asia which is fast-growing (>100%), profitable, and internationalising soon.

• Started life as an SME lender in the Philippines in 2016 to solve the SME credit gap.
• Expanded product range to include business bank accounts & payments, e-Invoices, corporate credit cards, rooftop solar, and deposits.
• Excellent track record results from our people & culture, combining high standards & intensity with a collegiate environment.
• In 2027, we’ll expand our geographical coverage to include at least two new markets in APAC.