Software Engineer (Backend)

Location: London or New York - in office 3 days a week

Global payments are not broken. Incentives are. Clearing has been deprioritized inside balance sheet driven institutions whose models rely on lending and interest. When liquidity takes priority over settlement, payments slow and certainty drops. The same financial institutions that distort clearing as providers are disadvantaged as users. They are forced into fragmented setups, inconsistent rails, duplicated compliance, and unpredictable timelines. Stablecoin shortcuts and treasury pooling treat symptoms at the surface, but almost no one is rebuilding the underlying infrastructure in each market. 

Rebuilding clearing from the ground up

We are rebuilding clearing as its own specialist function. We act as a clearing and transaction banking partner for regulated institutions, with treasury built into the core so liquidity, settlement, and reconciliation sit in one controlled system.

Our platform unifies global and local licenses, direct central bank clearing, and access to domestic rails. We allow clients to open named customer accounts in every market we operate, collecting funds and paying out through a single network while retaining full ownership of their customer relationships. Market expansion becomes as simple as one correspondent relationship, not hundreds.

Why Lorum

Joining Lorum means contributing to one of the most ambitious clearing infrastructure projects in global finance. You will help shape settlement systems that perform under real regulatory standards and institutional volumes. You will build for regulated institutions that rely on precision, predictable timelines, and regulatory integrity. It is about working across currencies, markets, and supervisory frameworks to deliver reliable, final settlement.

Role purpose

We are looking for an experienced backend engineer to join our team and help build the foundational infrastructure. You’ll be joining a small, cross-functional team focused on shipping real value quickly and building systems that are observable, reliable, and designed to evolve.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working in fast-moving environments, thrives in ambiguity, and cares deeply about building high-quality backend systems that solve real-world problems. We’re particularly looking for engineers with strong experience in distributed systems and an interest in working with Rust.

We don’t expect you to have experience with our exact stack, but we do expect you to bring deep engineering expertise, sound judgment, and a pragmatic approach to problem solving.

Key Responsibilities

• Backend systems design & implementation 

  • Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs in Rust (or similar languages with a path to Rust). 

  • Implement robust domain logic for clearing, payments, accounts, and reconciliation. 

  • Contribute to architectural decisions and help evolve our service boundaries and integrations.

• Scalability, performance & reliability 

  • Build systems that can handle high‑volume, high‑reliability financial workloads. 

  • Design with observability in mind (metrics, logs, tracing) and use data to drive improvements. 

  • Participate in on‑call and incident response, helping to diagnose and resolve production issues.

• Security & compliance aware engineering 

  • Work closely with Security and GRC teams to ensure services meet security and compliance requirements (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001). 

  • Implement secure coding practices, strong authentication and authorization patterns, and data protection controls. 

  • Contribute to internal documentation and standards around secure and compliant engineering.

• Collaboration & delivery 

  • Partner with Product Managers and other stakeholders to refine requirements and scope work. 

  • Break down projects into well‑defined tasks and deliver value iteratively. 

  • Review code, provide feedback, and help maintain high engineering standards across the team.

• Tooling, testing & continuous improvement 

  • Write comprehensive tests (unit, integration, and where appropriate property‑based tests) and support automated testing in CI/CD. 

  • Contribute to internal tooling, developer experience, and shared libraries. 

  • Share knowledge, mentor peers, and help raise the overall technical bar.

Ideal candidate

• Must-Haves 

• 3+ years of experience building backend systems in a strongly typed language (e.g. Rust, Go, Java, Kotlin, C++, or similar). 

• Commercial experience in backend or systems engineering, working on distributed services or APIs. 

• Genuine interest in working with Rust day‑to‑day (prior Rust experience or demonstrable learning is important). 

• Solid understanding of backend fundamentals: concurrency, data modelling, transactions, reliability, and observability. 

• Experience designing and consuming APIs (REST/gRPC/GraphQL) and integrating with other services and data stores. 

• Strong testing mindset and familiarity with CI/CD workflows. 

• Clear communication skills and a collaborative approach to working with Product, Operations, and other engineers.

• Nice-to-Haves 

• Hands‑on experience with Rust in production or substantial personal/OSS projects. 

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking, trading, or other financial infrastructure domains. 

• Familiarity with event‑driven architectures, message queues, and stream processing. 

• Experience with PostgreSQL (or similar relational databases) and data‑intensive workloads. 

• Experience running services on a major cloud provider (e.g. AWS, GCP) and with containerisation/orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes). 

• Exposure to regulated or high‑assurance environments and the constraints they introduce.

Benefits

• Opportunity to travel (if applicable)

• Flexible vacation policy

• Private Healthcare

• Employee stock ownership (ESOP)

• Flexible working and autonomy

• Pay it forward days - we offer 2 annual pay it forward days where you can take time to volunteer for a charitable cause that is important to you.

• Wellness days - we believe you can only work your best when you feel your best, and we know working at Lorum is intense, so we offer 3 wellness days every quarter where you can take time to re-energise.