Senior Engineering Manager | Win on Data (hybrid + remote) Germany / remote

Senior Engineering Manager | Win on Data (hybrid + remote) Office: United Kingdom Remote: Germany | Portugal | Spain | UK Apply for this role

About the company

About Cleo

At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper-intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating.

Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast-growing unicorn with over $300 million in ARR and growing over 2x year-over-year. This isn't just a job; it's a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are not only at the top of their field but also embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact.

If you’re driven by complex challenges that push your expertise, the chance to shape something truly transformative, and the potential to share in Cleo’s success as we scale, while growing alongside a company that’s scaling fast, this might be your perfect fit.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.

The Role

Cleo is radically different from the norm, and we’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead and evolve our engineers across cross-functional product squads within our Win on Data pillar — the intelligence engine at the heart of our business: tens of terabytes of transaction data today (and rapidly growing).

What ChatGPT has done for the English language we want to do for financial transactions. We want to really learn the language of transactions and be able to use that to make sure that we're making the best risk decisions and that we're having the best conversations that actually help our users.

In this role, you won’t just oversee delivery. You’ll shape the teams responsible for transforming messy, fast-growing transaction data into the high-fidelity financial understanding that powers every feature we build. From enrichment and categorisation to platform scalability and ML-enabled insight, your pillar underpins the experiences millions of users rely on to manage their money.

You’ll be responsible for the technical delivery and health of multiple squads as they build critical data capabilities that directly impact retention, LTV and new product development. At the same time, you’ll own the wellbeing, growth and progression of your reports — creating an environment where engineers can do the best work of their careers.

You’ll lead all people management across your pillar. That means hiring the right blend of Technical Leads, Data and Backend Engineers across levels, building a thoughtful headcount plan aligned to our ambition, and coaching individuals to stretch into bigger scope and influence. You’ll actively develop our squad Leads into more senior leaders, strengthening succession and multiplying impact over time.

You’ll be accountable for engineering across several squads, partnering deeply with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning and Experience to build truly high-performing cross-functional teams. This pillar operates at a significant scale – transaction data represents the majority of our data estate and is growing rapidly – so your ability to balance velocity with robustness will be key.

From a technical leadership perspective, you’ll raise the bar continuously. You’ll identify opportunities to improve architecture and platform foundations, contribute meaningfully to design discussions, review and challenge technical proposals, and shape the longer-term technical roadmap for a pillar that the entire company depends on.

This is a role for someone who wants real ownership —not just of teams, but of a data foundation that defines Cleo’s future.

Want to hear directly from the team? Check out this blog post from a few of our engineering managers.

About you

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager with exceptional people leadership skills and a deep understanding of how to build a culture of technical excellence. On top of this:

You are the kind of manager who is people first, technology second. We build environments that enable engineers to be the most impactful engineers possible. We have to strike the right balance between short-term gains and long-term sustainability, and our engineering principles reflect this.

You’ve previously been a hands‑on software developer, but these days get your energy from software architecture and organisation design, debugging people and processes, and delivering through others.

You are a great communicator. We are a tight‑knit engineering management team who support one another to be the best leaders possible. You’re comfortable both challenging and being challenged, and you know how to create clarity in complex spaces.

You are comfortable with change and can adapt to constantly evolving circumstances. We’re growing the team, and we want you to grow with us on that journey.

You practise a learning and growth mindset. We move quickly and experiment often, and we need you to help teams learn fast and improve continuously. Most importantly, you’re excited by owning a pillar that underpins the entire business: our financial understanding of users.

In the Win on Data pillar, everything we build depends on turning messy, large‑scale transaction data into a complete, accurate and unified model of a user’s finances. This is high‑impact, high‑scale work. Our transaction data represents the majority of our data estate and is growing rapidly. Every downstream experience — from core product features to ML‑powered insights — relies on this foundation being robust, reliable and intelligently designed.

You’ll lead teams responsible for building and evolving this intelligence core: improving transaction enrichment quality, scaling our data and ML platforms, and enabling Cleo to create entirely new value propositions for users. Success here directly drives retention, LTV and our long‑term product strategy.

You don’t just want to run teams. You want to shape the data foundations that power everything.

Learn more about what transaction enrichment means to Cleo here

Our Tech Stack

Cleo is built as a Ruby on Rails monolith with a single React Native app frontend, utilising TypeScript. We also leverage Python for machine learning services and PostgreSQL for our database, all hosted on AWS. Our CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, with production deployments happening on every merge via Heroku. Our backend engineers deploy multiple times a week, and we release our frontend app to Google and Apple for review at least once a week.

While we take a pragmatic approach, we place a strong emphasis on quality. Our code is peer‑reviewed, and we maintain automated testing using Minitest and CircleCI. We’re also actively working towards a more modular architecture, focusing on separating concerns to achieve all the benefits of microservices within a monolith, while progressively refactoring our code as we build new features. Everyone in the engineering team contributes to driving our technical strategy, voices & ideas from all levels are valued: we are all owners at Cleo.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with three annual reviews, aligned to our termly OKR planning cycles . You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here:
• Work at one of the fastest‑growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility . We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. Our Poland team works fully remotely, but we host virtual socials and an annual company offsite somewhere in Europe with all expenses paid.
• Other benefits;
• Company‑wide performance reviews every 4 months
• Generous pay increases for high‑performing team members
• Equity top‑ups for team members getting promoted
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days)
• Private medical insurance
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in‑person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• Enhanced parental leave
• Workplace Nursery Scheme
• And many more!

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK. If you’re an existing user, you’ll still have access to the app. But some features won’t be available. Why? 99% of our users are based in the US – where financial health is often overlooked. We’ve decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we’ll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future.