Senior Engineer (m/f/d)

Ivy is building the world’s first programmable bank. We know the bank of the future is going to be fully regulated and stablecoin-native. We believe that the crypto folks are too afraid of full bank charters, while the bank folks know too little about crypto to pull it off. We believe there’s a trillion-dollar opportunity to launch regulated banks built on the blockchain.

Today, we bank the world’s leading crypto platforms (Kraken). Tomorrow, our platform will power global correspondent banking. And who's going to bank all these AI agents? We are certain that if we get this right, Ivy is going to be Europe’s first $1T company.

We are a team of ex-founders, early employees at unicorns, and top-tier talent from fintech and banking, and we are backed by the world’s best fintech investors:

• Valar - Peter Thiel and the Valar team have been thinking about global money since PayPal times.

• Creandum - Previously invested in fintechs like Klarna, Trade Republic, Pleo, and iZettle

• 10+ unicorn founders

You're a super IC in a small, elite engineering team. You own core banking systems end to end - design, build, ship, run. You take on big projects, drive them yourself, and deliver.

You build the stuff that moves money. APIs, transaction flows, settlement logic, client integrations. The team is small on purpose - that means you ship a lot, you move fast, and you make decisions that actually matter. You decide, you build, you own the outcome.

You work with engineering, product, and clients. You turn complex financial problems into clean code. You're trusted with the big calls - system design, technical tradeoffs, what we build and what we don't.

You're part of the product engineering team. You’re building the Programmable Bank - a bank for the new age of money movement, built around Digital Assets and AI. Your team builds the banking core across bare metals central bank infrastructure and blockchain infrastructure. We are building rather a “swiss clock” than doing foundational research, your job is precision engineering to make a complex system work in a simplistic and highly reliable way.

Understand the codebase and increase your ownership rapidly.

Month 1-2: You ramp up fast. Understand the codebase, the domain, the product and ship meaningful code in your first weeks. Pick up a major project as an IC and start driving it. You're pairing with the team but operating independently early.

Month 3-4: You've shipped your first big project end to end. You know the domain well enough to push back on product decisions when something doesn't make sense. You're starting to influence technical direction - how we model data, how we handle edge cases, where we take shortcuts and where we don't.

Month 5-6: You're one of the people the team relies on for the hardest problems. You scope and drive projects autonomously. You have strong opinions on how the core banking systems should evolve and you're acting on them. Junior engineers come to you because your code is clean and your thinking is clear.

We believe that throwing smart people with high agency at big problems produces the best outcomes. In the past, we have seen people succeed at Ivy with the following traits ranked by importance:

1. Safe Hands: You can run on your own and finish the job no matter what comes in your way.

2. Genius Coder: Your former teammates would rank you in the top 5% of engineers they've worked with. You write code that's clean, correct, and easy to delete.

3. Team Player: Low ego, high trust. You follow someone else's lead when they're right, you help others ship, and you never optimise for looking good over the team winning.

4. Smartness: You are generally just very smart and can pick up new things quickly.

5. Taste: Strong opinions, loosely held. You solve problems as simply as possible and focus on the highest-impact thing first. You know when to be scrappy and when to be precise.

6. Urgency: You merge your PR today, not tomorrow. You'd rather ship and iterate than wait for perfection.

• You want to build core banking systems that handle real money, not another CRUD app

• You care about simplicity more than cleverness

• You'd rather own a problem end to end than wait for someone to hand you a spec

• You want to work alongside people who are genuinely great at what they do

• You get excited about building something from early stage that actually matters
  

• You think that a new fancy pattern or architecture principle will solve all your problems

• You think "that's not my problem" is an acceptable answer

• You can not follow other team member’s decisions

• You are closing your macbook at 5pm sharp and don’t care about your work

• You are not passionate about what you do

• 5+ years of hands‑on software development experience (backend-focused).

• 3+ years in early‑stage or small startup environments.

• Based in Berlin or willing to relocate (full relocation support provided).

We have designed our process to make it as short and straightforward as possible:

1. Screening Call - 15 minutes: Initial touchpoint to get familiar with the process and role expectations.

2. Meet the CTO - 20 minutes: Get to know and see if there is a match in expectations.

3. Technical Challenge I - 60 minutes: Live coding challenge designed to assess your technical depth.

4. References: We talk with people you have worked with in the past.

5. Onsite Interview Day - 3h: You come to the office for Technical Challenge II, System Design (1h) and to meet the key people from the team you will work with (2h)

6. Offer

Between each step, we send followups within 48h of the last step. We cover all travel costs for the on-site day. Our goal is to move from application to offer within 14 days, with feedback within 3 days of your final interview.

• Join a Dream Team: We focus on building a team of exceptional people who grow fast, take on big challenges, and inspire each other to deliver at the highest level.

• No Bullshit: Output over input, bias for action - we move fast and follow through, customer value over internal policies. We believe in big outcomes, not titles or hierarchies.

• Real Participation: Employees are shareholders. Every permanent employee participates in our equity program.

• Perks & Benefits: Relocation support, Visa Support, the latest Apple gear (MacBook + AirPods), lunch benefit, Gym benefit, a beautiful office in the heart of the city, 4x on-/offsites per year, weekly team dinner, and an annual development budget.