Principal Site Reliability Engineer, iwoca
£100-140k
More information about location
Online loans for small businesses
Open for applications
Online loans for small businesses
201-500 employees
Open for applications
£100-140k
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
To fund one million small businesses.
Role
Who you are
- Experience designing, building, and scaling data-intensive systems and ideally with Kubernetes, PostgreSQL hosted in AWS RDS, and Snowflake
- A track record of shaping incident processes, on-call practices, or sharing reliability ownership across multiple teams
- Deep understanding of site reliability principles and applying them to databases, including observability and limiting the impact of long-running or resource-heavy queries
- Experience with infrastructure automation, like setting up monitoring and alerting for pipelines
Desirable
- Strong academic background in maths, physics, computer science, engineering, or a related field
- Active in tech or open-source communities, with a passion for sharing knowledge and inspiring others
- An open mind and the flexibility to approach challenges from different angles
- Experience with observability platforms such as DataDog
- Experience with managing infrastructure management using Terraform
- Familiarity Python, SQL, Go
What the job involves
- You’ll join the Core Systems team, who optimise development, build data systems, and continuously improve iwoca products
- They follow Agile-inspired processes, using continuous integration and delivery so that features go live in days or weeks, not months or years
- You’ll influence iwoca’s tech strategy to make our systems more reliable and as we get closer to our goal of funding one million businesses
- The role will focus on complex data systems and flows that power multiple internal products and services
- Our biggest reliability challenges aren’t sudden spikes in users or data volume - they’re the accumulating complexity, interconnectivity, and constant evolution of these internal systems
- So, you’ll need to empathise with different team’s pressures, have a practical, problem-solving mindset, and do some far-sighted SRE work
- You’ll combine hands-on work with technical leadership to:
- Influence without authority- understand our systems, advocate for reliability improvements, and build relationships with other teams and tech leads to help them prioritise and deliver reliability changes
- Lead the adoption of new practices and tools - whether through prototypes, RFCs, working groups, or direct implementation
- We want you to develop our engineering culture to think about reliability before, during, and after incidents
- Collaborate with stream-aligned teams to design and deliver system improvements that benefit multiple internal consumers, not just a single application
- Set up load, performance, and stress tests to understand how our bespoke modelling system can scale and identify non-linear behaviours to improve
- Work with development teams to design and implement controls that prevent common failures - like request killers or circuit breakers, and modify our incident-response process
- Unpick some coupling in the production database
Salary benchmarks
Our take
UK SMEs are the backbone of a complex economy that is constantly changing, so the need for fast and responsive access to finance is becoming more and more important to ensure their success and growth. iwoca allows SMEs access to business loans in less than a minute, with its API and business marketplace partnerships.
With offerings like iwoca's, gone are the days where waiting up to eight weeks for a loan decision was viable. Its simplified business loans of £1,000 - £500,000 come with no fees attached, and applying online takes no more than five minutes. The ready availability of iwoca loans gives business owners a level of certainty, so that they can make instant decisions to help their business grow.
iwoca has made a number of partnerships with other players in the business finance space, including an impressive industry-first invoice checkout integration with QuickBooks. Funding raised by the company, which is now operating at net profitability, will enable it to meet a recent surge in demand for corporate loans and offer more to larger SMB businesses. And the company has made several billion in funding available to over 100,000 businesses since launching, positioning itself as a leading European fintech.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Opportunities to learn
"Great opportunities available to learn from both individuals through shadowing, and teams through presentations and even secondment opportunities -..."
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2019
$13.7m
GRANT
Feb 2019
$27.3m
SERIES D
Total funding: $99m
Company benefits
- Work where you work best: Twice a year we rent houses in places like Sicily and the French Alps where each team can work together for a week poolside. We champion flexible working in all our teams
- Invest in iwoca: We want people to be invested in iwoca's success so after six months you'll be awarded share options
- Keep yourself healthy: We offer comprehensive health insurance and cash plans. You'll also get gym discounts and we host yoga classes in the office every week
- Start (and end) your day right: Each floor of iwoca HQ has a fully stocked fridge for breakfast and every Friday we unwind with beers and wine
- Life-work balance: We know your life outside of work comes first. We offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave for new parents plus a nursery benefit. We also have unlimited unpaid leave
- Learning and development: Whether you want to learn to code, experiment with motion design, or beat cognitive biases, you'll have time and budget to invest in your professional development
Company values
- Motivated: Going to work shouldn't feel like a slog, so we want everyone in the team to personally care about what they're working on. We stay motivated by celebrating our wins, learning from our mistakes, and always looking for new gaps to step into
- Smart: At iwoca being smart isn't about what you know, it's about how you think. Smart thinking means looking at each problem by asking ‘why’ first, then figuring out ‘how’
- Humble: We know all ideas are flawed, all code has bugs, and everyone makes mistakes - it’s how we learn. For us, being humble means you question yourself first, rather than your team
- Growth Mindset: We think there's always a better way to solve a problem. So we never let ourselves get comfortable with being good enough
Company HQ
Fitzrovia, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Christoph Rieche
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously spent 7 years at Goldman Sachs as a Vice President before co-founding iwoca in 2011.
Joost Versteeg
(CMO)Joost initially joined iwoca in 2017 as an Intern. Since then, they have held a number of roles, from Growth Analyst to Head of Commercial Strategy and became CMO in 2024.
People progressing
Serita joined as a Customer Onboarder, before moving into the Broker Team. Most recently they have been promoted to Partnership Manager.
Leo joined in 2018 as a Client Onboarder. Since then, they have worked in a number of roles and now serve as the Product Manager.
Jenny originally joined the Client Onboarding team and now leads the Customer Success department for the German business.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at iwoca
- We work hard to make iwoca a place where everyone feels welcome, where you can confidently be yourself. We understand that diversity isn't an optional add-on, it's the core ingredient of what makes us great.
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