Senior Product Engineer - Pensions and Spend

About Kota

Kota is reimagining insurance and retirement benefits for the modern workforce. Through our two flagship products - Kota Platform, the first fully integrated benefits platform, and Kota Embed, our embedded insurance solution - we're making benefits more accessible, valued, and global.

Today, we power benefits for tens of thousands of employees at Europe's most forward-thinking companies, including Carwow, Tines, Zoe, and Remote. Founded in 2022, we've raised more than €20M from leading investors such as EQT Ventures, Eurazeo, Northzone, and Frontline, as well as founders and executives from Workday, Remote, Personio, OpenAI, and more.

The role & team

We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer to join the Investments team, building the product that powers workplace pensions, retirement savings and our spend product https://www.kota.io/spend at Kota. It's a full stack role with a backend lean, your strongest expertise will be backend and you'll work in the frontend when the product needs it.

The Investments team owns more than pensions. On one side, pension infrastructure is genuinely complex: multi-provider, multi-market and largely unmodernised. You'll design the systems that connect pension providers to employers and employees, covering contributions, fund data, payroll integrations and compliance across multiple markets.

On the other hand, you'll own our Spend product. This lets employers create allowances and issue cards to employees, who get a virtual Stripe card they can add to Apple or Google Wallet and spend in real time. It spans card issuing, wallet provisioning, transaction flows and the controls employers need to manage it. We want someone who starts with the customer, not the code, and proactively adds to the roadmap rather than just picking up tickets. This is an autonomous role, you'll be trusted to make product calls, not just technical ones.

What you'll do

- Design and build the systems that power Kota's Investments products; pensions, retirement savings and Spend: contributions, onboarding, provider integrations, employer-facing configuration, card issuing and wallet provisioning

- Own technical architecture for the Investments stream, integrating with external pension and savings providers as well as payment and card infrastructure (Stripe)

- Contribute to frontend code (React + TypeScript) when a feature calls for it

- Join client calls where it helps you understand or explain a problem, and proactively shape the roadmap rather than just picking up tickets

- Use AI actively in your day-to-day work, for building, reviewing and speeding up how you ship

- Contribute to code reviews and technical planning, and keep the systems you own stable and observable

- Help shape how the Investments team works as it grows

What we're looking for

- 6+ years building backend systems in production comfortable picking up frontend (React/TypeScript) when needed

- Experience designing and maintaining integrations with third-party APIs

- Strong understanding of data modelling, event-driven patterns, and building for correctness and auditability

- A clear communicator who can talk to engineers and customers, and knows which version to use with which audience

- A product mindset and a bias to bring ideas, not just execute them, proactively adding to the roadmap

- You take real ownership, if a request from a client or lead doesn't match your own understanding of the problem, you say so rather than building to spec anyway

- You think carefully about reliability, security and compliance, and are comfortable with ambiguity and ownership in a fast-growing startup

- AI-forward mindset, we use AI daily to build and improve our systems and expect you to as well

Why join us?

- Technically interesting problem - pension infrastructure is genuinely complex: multi-provider, multi-market and largely unmodernised

- Agency - we hire people and trust them. You'll own meaningful parts of the system end to end

- Customer proximity - you'll see the impact of what you build, and hear directly from the people using it

- High-quality culture - we care about clean design and thoughtful engineering

- Impact from day one - we're a small, focused team. What you build ships fast and matters

- AI-first - we invest heavily in AI tooling and token usage. We're not precious about the spend, if it helps you build better or faster, use it

Our hiring process

- Introductory call (30 mins): a casual chat with one or two of our product team

- Technical interview (90 mins): a collaborative, open-book session with two engineers, working through a real-world problem together

- Call with founders (30 mins): we'll share our vision and hear your thoughts

- Final response: we'll follow up promptly with next steps

Kota benefits

- Health insurance via Kota

- Workplace pension with matched contributions up to 5% via Kota

- WFH stipend to support your home office setup

- Generous paid time off, work hard and take the time you need

- Access to office space in Dublin or a co-working space, wherever you're based

- Flexible working hours, we're remote-first with some fixed hours for team alignment

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.