Senior Discovery Engineer, Cleo
+ Equity
AI personal finance assistant
Be an early applicant
AI personal finance assistant
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
Our mission is to change the world’s relationship with money.
Role
Who you are
- Product engineering mindset: you don’t just write code – you think about market fit, user needs, and commercial impact
- High ambiguity comfort: you thrive when nothing’s defined yet, and you create clarity through action
- Entrepreneurial Spirit: you’re always thinking about the next big opportunity
- Curiosity for emerging tech: you’re ahead of the curve on LLMs, AI capabilities, and other new tools – and you apply that curiosity to solving problems
- Startup experience: you’ve built from scratch, shipped hacky but effective demos, and moved at pace
- Hands-on prototyping: whether it’s React Native, Ruby on Rails, Python, AWS, or something else, you can get a prototype live fast and test it with real users
What the job involves
- Our Discovery Squad lives in Cleo’s New Bets pillar – the place where we explore new verticals, validate wild concepts, and decide what’s worth scaling into a product
- This isn’t 0 > 1 MVP building (we have Build Squads for that)
- This is the earliest stage of the earliest stage: identifying opportunities, testing feasibility, prototyping new capabilities, and scoping the weird and wonderful ideas that could become Cleo’s next big thing
- You’re not inheriting a backlog; you’re defining what goes on it
- Join the founding team dedicated to bringing new Cleo products to life & changing the world's relationship with money
- Be as far “left” in the product process as you can be – imagining and pioneering what we’ve never done before, shaping strategy & exploring entirely new verticals for Cleo…all from scratch!
- Partner with product, design, user research, and analytics to brainstorm, validate, and de-risk ideas fast
- Go from “hmm, what if…?” to “here’s a janky but convincing demo” in under 6 weeks (often much faster)
- Decide not just if we should build something, but how we could build it – and where the technical gotchas lie
- For the right person, this is going to be a dream-y role: founder-level creativity…without the chaos of running a startup, and with the support & resources of a profitable, high-growth Series C tech company
- Lead tech-driven discovery: shape the earliest stage of new ideas. Spin up prototypes, run fake-door and weightless tests, and explore the feasibility of concepts before they hit Build
- Scope & assess feasibility: conduct due diligence on third party docs, estimate team size and timelines, and identify blockers or creative workarounds
- Own your roadmap: no waiting for tickets – proactively find your own work, prioritise ideas worth exploring, and kill off the weak ones
- Experiment at pace: from concept to greenlight in weeks, not months. Think: Cleo Debt prototype (built in a week!!!) kinda pace
- Inspire the team: bring fresh thinking, articles, and emerging tech trends into brainstorms. Push the boundaries of what we could build
- Collaborate deeply: work with our innovation lead, designers, user researchers, and analysts to get ideas into users’ hands, test them, and learn fast
- Balance creativity with practicality: be the person who can say “this isn’t possible…but here’s what is, and here’s a demo I made.”
- 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
Our take
People are increasingly not satisfied with the products being offered by traditional banks, which have proven slow to react to the needs of younger consumers who expect more from their everyday experiences.
Cleo was one of the first companies to make great use of chatbots that sit within Facebook's messenger app. This chatbot-first approach and Gen Z user base have given it strong virality. It now has millions of registered users, 99% of which are based in the US, leading to a decision to take a year break from the UK market to focus on its US Gen Z customers. And after a successful year in the US its now eyeing up a return to the UK.
Its Series C funding will help the company to double down in the US, where it will make a significant increase in employee headcount, and enable Cleo to maintain and expand its service during an economic downturn.
Financial advice delivered via bots is a crowded space, so Cleo benefits from having a strong brand presence. It has gone for very bold, fun, Gen Z-focused messaging which helps it to stand out from competitors such as Emma, Plum, and Chip.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jun 2022
$80m
SERIES C
Dec 2020
$44m
SERIES B
Total funding: $137.5m
Company benefits
- Learning and development
- Mental health support
- Agile working
Company values
- Make it Happen
- No bullsh*t
- Learn at Speed
- Bring Good Vibes
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
Barnaby Hussey-Yeo
(Founder & CEO)Previously a Data Scientist at Wonga, one of the companies that pioneered the smart use of data for loan decisions. Joined Entrepreneur First where Cleo was formed.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Cleo
Annie Jackson (Head of Talent )
- We’ve set up an internal committee of truly passionate people that are dedicated to ensuring Diversity and Inclusion is embedded in how we all operate as a team. We agree on meaningful actions, and get on with implementing them. We have three main focuses right now, which are:
- 1) Improving SocioEconomic diversity across the company
- 2) Increasing the number of women in Leadership roles
- 3) More community outreach
- Check out our 2022 Diversity and Inclusion report, here: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/cleo-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-report-2022
Share this job
View 39 more jobs at Cleo