About The Company
About Cleo
At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper-intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating.
Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast-growing unicorn with over $200 million in ARR and growing over 2x year-over-year. This isn't just a job; it's a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are not only at the top of their field but also embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact.
If you’re driven by complex challenges that push your expertise, the chance to shape something truly transformative, and the potential to share in Cleo’s success as we scale, while growing alongside a company that’s scaling fast, this might be your perfect fit.
Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.
About The Role
Our Discovery Squad lives in Cleo’s New Bets pillar – the place where we explore new verticals, validate wild concepts, and decide what’s worth scaling into a product. This isn’t 0 > 1 MVP building (we have Build Squads for that). This is the earliest stage of the earliest stage: identifying opportunities, testing feasibility, prototyping new capabilities, and scoping the weird and wonderful ideas that could become Cleo’s next big thing. You’re not inheriting a backlog; you’re defining what goes on it. Join the founding team dedicated to bringing new Cleo products to life & changing the world's relationship with money.
As a Senior Discovery Engineer, You’ll
- Be as far “left” in the product process as you can be – imagining and pioneering what we’ve never done before, shaping strategy & exploring entirely new verticals for Cleo…all from scratch!
- Partner with product, design, user research, and analytics to brainstorm, validate, and de-risk ideas fast.
- Go from “hmm, what if…?” to “here’s a janky but convincing demo” in under 6 weeks (often much faster).
- Decide not just if we should build something, but how we could build it – and where the technical gotchas lie.
For the right person, this is going to be a dream-y role: founder-level creativity…without the chaos of running a startup, and with the support & resources of a profitable, high-growth Series C tech company.
Read about Cleo 3.0 > some of the coolest updates you’ll see there were incubated right here in this squad.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Lead tech-driven discovery: shape the earliest stage of new ideas. Spin up prototypes, run fake-door and weightless tests, and explore the feasibility of concepts before they hit Build.
- Scope & assess feasibility: conduct due diligence on third party docs, estimate team size and timelines, and identify blockers or creative workarounds.
- Own your roadmap: no waiting for tickets – proactively find your own work, prioritise ideas worth exploring, and kill off the weak ones.
- Experiment at pace: from concept to greenlight in weeks, not months. Think: Cleo Debt prototype (built in a week!!!) kinda pace.
- Inspire the team: bring fresh thinking, articles, and emerging tech trends into brainstorms. Push the boundaries of what we could build.
- Collaborate deeply: work with our innovation lead, designers, user researchers, and analysts to get ideas into users’ hands, test them, and learn fast.
- Balance creativity with practicality: be the person who can say “this isn’t possible…but here’s what is, and here’s a demo I made.”
About You
- Product engineering mindset: you don’t just write code – you think about market fit, user needs, and commercial impact.
- High ambiguity comfort: you thrive when nothing’s defined yet, and you create clarity through action.
- Entrepreneurial Spirit: you’re always thinking about the next big opportunity.
- Curiosity for emerging tech: you’re ahead of the curve on LLMs, AI capabilities, and other new tools – and you apply that curiosity to solving problems.
- Startup experience: you’ve built from scratch, shipped hacky but effective demos, and moved at pace.
- Hands-on prototyping: whether it’s React Native, Ruby on Rails, Python, AWS, or something else, you can get a prototype live fast and test it with real users.
Our Tech Stack
Cleo is built as a Ruby on Rails monolith with a single React Native app frontend, utilising TypeScript. We also leverage Python for machine learning services and PostgreSQL for our database, all hosted on AWS. Our CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, with production deployments happening on every merge via Heroku. Our backend engineers deploy multiple times a week, and we release our frontend app to Google and Apple for review at least once a week.
While we take a pragmatic approach, we place a strong emphasis on quality. Our code is peer-reviewed, and we maintain automated testing using Minitest and CircleCI. We're also actively working towards a more modular architecture, focusing on separating concerns to achieve all the benefits of microservices within a monolith, while progressively refactoring our code as we build new features. Everyone in the engineering team contributes to driving our technical strategy, voices & ideas from all levels are valued: we are all owners at Cleo.
What do you get for all your hard work?
- A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with bi-annual reviews, aligned to our quarterly OKR planning cycles. You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/
- Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
- A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
- Flexibility. We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work
- Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
- Other benefits;
- Company-wide performance reviews every 6 months
- Generous pay increases for high-performing team members
- Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted
- 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days)
- 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
- Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
- Enhanced parental leave
- 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
- Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
- We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
- Online mental health support via Spill
- Workplace Nursery Scheme
- And many more!
We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.
UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK (but only until next year). If you’re an existing user, you’ll still have access to the app. But some features won’t be available (just for a little while). Why? 99% of our users are based in the US – where financial health is often overlooked. We’ve decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we’ll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future.
By submitting this application, I confirm that all the information given by me in this application for employment and any additional documents attached hereto are true to the best of my knowledge and that I have not wilfully suppressed any material fact. I confirm I have disclosed if applicable any previous employment with CLEO. I accept that if any of the information given by me in this application is in any way false or incorrect, my application may be rejected, any offer of employment may be withdrawn or my employment with CLEO may be terminated summarily or I may be dismissed. By submitting this application, I agree that my personal data will be processed in accordance with CLEO's Candidate Privacy Notice
By submitting this application, I confirm that all the information given by me in this application for employment and any additional documents attached hereto are true to the best of my knowledge and that I have not wilfully suppressed any material fact. I confirm I have disclosed if applicable any previous employment with CLEO. I accept that if any of the information given by me in this application is in any way false or incorrect, my application may be rejected, any offer of employment may be withdrawn or my employment with CLEO may be terminated summarily or I may be dismissed. By submitting this application, I agree that my personal data will be processed in accordance with CLEO's Candidate Privacy Notice 
