Staff Engineer - Core BankingShine exists to help freelancers and small business owners reclaim the joy of working for themselves.
Running a business shouldn't mean drowning in financial admin - it should be inspiring and rewarding. Our app brings banking, invoicing, accounting and admin together in one place, so entrepreneurs can focus on what matters most: growing their business and enjoying the freedom of working for themselves.
We're a multicultural team of over 400 people across France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. By bringing together leading European fintechs like Shine, Kontist and Tellow, we've built a single, intuitive platform designed for simplicity, speed and accuracy - backed by local, award-winning support.
Your hiring experience matters
Just as we respect our customers' time, we respect yours. Your experience with Shine should feel simple, transparent and genuinely supportive.
If this sounds like somewhere you want to grow, we'd love to hear from you.
The Banking Foundations area builds and operates the systems at the core of Shine: our ledger, payment orchestration, and account infrastructure.
These systems play a key role in delivering a seamless experience for our customers. They ensure balances remain strictly accurate, while keeping the complex mechanics of money movement and clearing invisible from the customer's perspective.
Shine's banking platform is pre-production, with our first market launch approaching. You'll be making the architectural decisions that get us to go-live, and shaping how the platform scales into new markets and into the hundreds of thousands of customers beyond it.
This includes challenges such as maintaining consistency across asynchronous payment flows, ensuring reliable reconciliation against our SEPA payment processor, and evolving our systems to support multi-market complexity at scale, under the operational expectations of EU banking regulators.
You will act as a Staff Engineer across the Banking Foundations area, working with multiple teams to define and drive the architecture of our core financial systems.
Your focus will be on the correctness, scalability, and operability of our ledger, account model, and payment orchestration systems.
You will work across a group of 20+ engineers, partnering with Engineering Managers and senior engineers to guide technical direction and ensure consistent, high-quality execution.
This role requires adapting your level of hands-on involvement depending on the situation. At times you will focus on architecture and system design, and at others contribute directly to critical parts of the system.
Experience: Strong hands-on experience building and scaling distributed backend systems in modern cloud environments (TypeScript, Node.js, GCP, Pub/Sub, Docker, Terraform).
Architecture: Deep understanding of distributed systems design, including trade-offs between consistency, availability, and operational complexity. Experience designing systems with strong guarantees around correctness, data integrity, and recovery under failure.
System Design Patterns: Practical experience with Event-Driven Architectures, CQRS, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and the ability to apply these patterns pragmatically.
Payment & Financial Systems: Experience working on systems where correctness is critical, ideally in payments or financial domains. Direct experience with SEPA rails, reconciliation, or scheme integration is a strong plus; familiarity with double-entry ledgers and transactional guarantees is essential.
Leadership & Communication: Ability to bring clarity to complex technical challenges, influence decisions across teams, and elevate engineers through collaboration, mentorship, and technical leadership.
Technical Direction: Define and drive the architecture of core banking systems, including ledger, accounts, and payment orchestration. Contribute to and review Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
System Integrity: Ensure systems provide strong guarantees around consistency, correctness, and auditability. Design for failure, recovery, and reconciliation.
Engineering Enablement: Guide teams in making sound technical decisions, improve engineering practices, and raise the quality bar across the area.
Execution Support: Contribute directly to complex or high-risk parts of the system when needed.
Knowledge Sharing: Lead technical discussions, run workshops, and mentor engineers to build shared understanding of system design and domain complexity.
This is a rare opportunity to shape the architecture of a modern core banking system at the moment it goes live.
The platform is already built on strong architectural foundations, including CQRS, event sourcing, per-service Postgres, Pub/Sub, and type-safe error handling. Your initial focus will be on taking it from a well-designed system to one we trust with real customer money, by establishing cross-service consistency, the AML clearance pathway, and reconciliation. From there, the work shifts to multi-market expansion and scaling to hundreds of thousands of customers.
You will work on systems where getting things right is not optional. Every decision has a direct impact on how money moves and how customers trust the platform. You will shape how these systems are built and operated at scale, directly powering the financial operations of thousands of businesses.
📍 Location: We are flexible. You can work hybrid from one of our hubs (Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin) or fully remote, with occasional travel for team meetups.
1️⃣ 30' call with Talent Acquisition — role context and mutual fit.
2️⃣ 30' call with the Hiring Manager — your background, the area's challenges, and your questions.
3️⃣ 60' System Design interview — a distributed-systems problem.
4️⃣ 60' Case Study with a cross-functional group — a real banking trade-off, worked through with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, to see how you bring clarity and collaborate.
5️⃣ A soft skills interview to see how we can best support your growth at Shine, followed by a team meeting
Equal Opportunity Employer
We follow the principle of equal treatment to consider all job applicants and do not discriminate based on their gender, sexual orientation, color, racial or ethnic origin, religion, disability, etc. as per applicable law.