Senior Engineer, Authentication and Authorization
Intro
At Pleo, we’re on a mission to revolutionise the way businesses manage company spending. No more outdated processes, clunky spreadsheets, or frustrating delays – we believe spend management should be seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. We’re creating tools that promote autonomy, foster trust, and let businesses focus on what truly matters.
Our culture is built on transparency, collaboration, and a deep commitment to innovation – which is reflected in our spending solution. At Pleo, you’ll join a passionate team shaping the future of work, all while having some fun along the way.
About the role
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Authentication & Authorization team at Pleo. In this role, you'll help build and evolve secure, scalable systems that handle authentication and authorization across our platform. You'll be part of a brand-new team responsible for renewing our approach to identity, access, and trust as we scale our product.
If you're excited about tackling complex technical challenges, collaborating across teams, and making authentication surprisingly easy for developers, this is the opportunity for you!
What you’ll be doing
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will:
- Design and deliver robust, scalable components of our authentication and authorization systems
- Collaborate with product, platform, and security teams to align solutions with business and infrastructure needs
- Drive quality through best practices in testing, observability, and operational excellence
- Mentor and guide junior engineers, fostering a culture of learning and curiosity
- Influence technical direction, contributing to design decisions that balance security, performance, and developer experience
What you bring
You’ll thrive in this role if you have:
- Deep technical expertise in building scalable systems and APIs
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, especially when working cross-functionally
- A passion for problem-solving, particularly in identity and access domains
- A proactive mindset, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and drive clarity
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), Kubernetes, and distributed systems
- Experience working with authentication and authorization standards (OAuth, OIDC, etc.)
- A background in Kotlin, TypeScript or similar backend languages
- Bonus: Experience with third-party auth providers like Auth0 or AWS Cognito
Who you’ll be working with and reporting to
You’ll work closely with teams in Product Engineering, Backend Core, and Security. Our team of authentication-focused engineers is highly collaborative and dedicated to building foundational systems that keep Pleo secure and flexible. You’ll also partner with teams across Infrastructure and Developer Experience to drive adoption and impact.
How you’ll develop in this role
In your first 6 months at Pleo, you’ll:
- Lead the delivery of key authentication components that enable secure and seamless user and service interactions
- Collaborate with platform teams to improve our internal developer experience with authentication
- Grow your skills in platform architecture, security engineering, and cross-team influence
We’re committed to helping you develop your career, whether that means taking on bigger projects, stepping into leadership, or acquiring new skills in distributed systems or security engineering.
Salary Range
The annual salary for this position varies based on your location:
United Kingdom: up to £86,500
Spain/Portugal: up to €92,500
We’re happy to share more about our approach to pay and this range during your first call with us!
Show me the benefits!
- Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
- Lunch is on us for your work days – enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜
- Comprehensive private healthcare – depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
- We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
- For our team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support ❤️🩹
- Access to LinkedIn Learning – acquire new skills, stay abreast of industry trends and fuel your personal and professional development continuously
- Paid parental leave – we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶
Why join us?
Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Our mission is to help every company go beyond the books. Pleo itself means ‘more than you’d expect’, and it’s been the secret to our success over the last 8 years. So it’s only fitting that we’d pass this philosophy onto our customers to help them make the most of their finances.
We think company spending should be delegated to all employees and teams, that it should be as automated as possible, and that it should drive a culture of responsible spending. Finance teams shouldn’t be siloed from the rest of the organisation – they should work in unity with marketing, sales, IT and everyone else.
Speaking of working in unity, our values tell the story of how we work at Pleo. We have four core values, the first of which is ‘champion the customer’, which means we address real pain points that businesses face. Next up is ‘succeed as a team’, which highlights how our strength lies in our diversity and trust in each other. We also ‘make it happen’ by taking bold decisions and following through to deliver results. Last but not least, we ‘build to scale’, creating lasting solutions that address today’s challenges and anticipate tomorrow’s needs.
So, in a nutshell, that's Pleo. Today we are a 850+ team, from over 100 nations, sitting in our Copenhagen HQ, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Lisbon offices —and quite a few full-time remotes in 35 other countries! Being HQ'd out of Copenhagen means we're inspired by things like a good work-life balance. If you don't work in the office with us, we'll help you set up the best remote setup possible and make sure you still have time to connect with your team.
About your application
- Please submit your application in English; it’s our company language so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join 💕
- We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there! Our lovely support isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone 😊
- We’re on a mission to make everyone feel valued at work. That’s only achievable if our team reflects the diversity of the world around us - and that starts with you, hitting apply, even if you are worried you might not tick all the boxes! We embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply - regardless of race/ethnicity, colour, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic status, culture or beliefs.
- When you submit an application we process your personal data as a data processor. Find out more about how your data is used in the FAQs section at the bottom of our jobs page.
Got any questions?
Read our FAQApply for this role
We’re looking for new friends, gifted minds, team players, restless talents and passionate problem solvers.
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And it doesn’t stop there. Why not have a browse at our other open roles in this department?
How Pleo hires
1
The first call(s)
Let’s get to know each other. We want to find out more about you, your motivations, and give you more information about the role.
2
The challenge
The task is deliberately open-ended and based on something you'll actually work on. There are no right or wrong answers here.
3
The team interview
Expect to share a (virtual) meeting room with two to three people you'll work with regularly if you get the job.
4
The final interview
A call with someone in leadership who’ll walk you through the big picture and chat about how your role will figure into that.
FAQ
This is a big decision for both of us. If you join us, we’ll spend a lot of time together working on some pretty cool things. That's why we've designed a hiring process that allows everyone to make the right choice. Read more about how we hire here.