The posting
BACKEND ENGINEER - ACQUISITION TECH - DE
Hybrid in London or remote within the UK
We’re looking for a Backend Engineer
You'll be the first engineer on the German side of Acquisition Tech, owning the customer acquisition systems that decide which small businesses iwoca reaches and how they convert.
The company
Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.
That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.
We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.
The team
The Acquisition Tech team owns how iwoca reaches German small businesses – across paid advertising, SEO, social media, direct mail, and outbound sales – and how they become customers. The data and models behind every channel sit with the team.
You'll report to the engineering lead for iwoca's German market, based in London alongside the rest of the technical team. Day to day you'll work with a product manager and a data scientist in London, plus commercial strategy, marketing, and sales – some of whom sit in Germany.
You'll be the only engineer on the German side of acquisition, working in iwoca's UK Acquisition Tech team's codebase. You'll work with their engineers on code reviews and design decisions.
The role
You'll build the backend behind iwoca's German acquisition technology – building on what already runs in the UK, and creating what Germany needs of its own.
- Ownership. You'll own the German side of the acquisition stack – from the lead-value signals iwoca sends to ad platforms, to the bidding and attribution built on them – and decide what to build from scratch.
- Technical strategy. You'll help shape the long-term roadmap. The team sets commercial objectives; you’ll shape the architecture, scaling, and technical direction.
- Funnel optimisation. You'll work with marketing and data science to target relevant businesses across paid search, direct mail, and outbound sales, and to convert more of them once they arrive. You'll integrate third-party APIs to minimise friction in sign-up and improve the lead data behind every channel.
- Data engineering. You'll build the pipelines, databases, and REST APIs behind the acquisition stack, plus the HubSpot tooling the sales team use.
- Models in production. You'll engineer the features that data scientists need, put their models into production, and set up the versioning and monitoring that keep them running.
The requirements
Essential:
- Backend engineering. You have hands-on experience designing and building backend systems in Python, in production.
- SQL. You are comfortable in SQL beyond CRUD. You shape schemas, tune queries, and reason about how data flows through relational systems.
- End-to-end. You take work from an initial problem through to delivery, shaping solutions, making trade-offs, and iterating based on how systems are used.
- Commercial or product thinking. You're comfortable working directly with marketing and sales. You take a business goal, dig into the root of what they need and why, then shape what gets built – as well as owning how.
- AI leverage. You've built agentic workflows, or used AI to scale your engineering output beyond what you could deliver alone. You judge when to use it and when not to.
- Communication. You write and speak clearly, directly, and concisely. You adapt technical detail to your audience.
Bonus:
- Full-stack. You’re open to coding frontend elements, particularly in React or TypeScript.
- Python stack. You have worked with SQLAlchemy, scikit-learn, pandas, and PostgreSQL.
- Database design. You have designed, built, and managed relational databases.
- Analytics tooling. You have used Snowflake, Looker, or the equivalent.
The salary
We expect to pay from £70,000 to £85,000 for this role. But, we're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.
The culture
At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.
We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.
The offices
We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:
- Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.
- Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.
The benefits
- Flexible working hours.
- Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
- A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
- 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
- A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
- Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
- 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.
- An employee equity incentive scheme.
- Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
- Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.
- Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.
And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:
- A learning and development budget for everyone.
- Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
- Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.
Useful links:
- iwoca benefits & policies https://coda.io/@iwocauk/iwoca-benefits-policies-uk
- Interview welcome pack https://coda.io/@iwocauk/interview-welcome-pack-tap (TAP)
