Tech Lead - Public API Team (f/m/d)

Upvest is on a mission to make investing as easy as spending money. The company empowers businesses to offer a wide range of investment products and the best experience in the field of capital market investment and retirement planning. Upvest’s Investment API is easy to integrate so that fintechs and enterprises alike can save resources and fully focus on their core business.‍

Upvest is one of the few fintechs in Europe that can provide its B2B clients with the full range of investment opportunities in the areas of principal broking business, proprietary trading, and safe custody business for traditional securities. The company was founded in 2017 by Martin Kassing and currently employs more than 200 people across Europe. Its latest €100m fundraising round (Series C) was led by Hedosophia and Sapphire Venture, with continued support from existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, BlackRock, Earlybird, HV Capital, Motive Ventures, and Notion Capital.

We currently employ 200+ people across Europe with our headquarters based in Berlin, Germany, and hubs in Tallinn, Estonia, and London, UK. We would consider hiring remotely for this role. If you do want to move to one of our hubs, we’re happy to support your relocation.

Your mission

We are seeking a full-time Tech Lead to help us build a securities API for financial institutions, the first API of that kind in Europe. 

You will build a team to own the highly scalable core services (webhooks, file sharing, etc.) that enable our domain teams to build a world-class securities API. You and your team will also support our public-facing API documentation offering through governance and technical improvements.

The team's mission

The Public API team is responsible for designing, operating, and continuously improving the face of our public API. The team enables a seamless, secure, and scalable API offering, starting with core services providing reliable event delivery, file sharing and robust documentation — empowering our partners and clients to integrate confidently and efficiently.

This role will give you the opportunity to

• Lead efforts to optimize event delivery mechanisms, including webhook reliability and public streaming solutions, to guarantee timely and dependable data flow

• Support secure data sharing processes with partners and clients, ensuring confidentiality and compliance throughout all interactions

• Define and enforce common API governance practices to ensure consistency, security, and compliance across all public-facing APIs

• Drive discovery and design of valuable cross-cutting core services improving our API platform offering

• Interact with internal and client stakeholders (Product Engineering Teams, Platform Engineers, and Customer Support) to ensure great product and build quality

• Deliver quality fast and often. We embrace an agile methodology with a retrospective and demo at the end of the two-week cycle

What you’ll bring

• The ability to bridge the why with the engineering side, discuss tradeoffs and proactively suggest ideas, aka a strong product engineering mindset

• Experience in leading and growing engineering teams in a technical leadership position

• Prior experience with message brokers such as Kafka

• Go proficiency or a strong willingness to learn

• Strong work ethic and principles such as pragmatism

• A focus on quality, extensibility, regression and E2E testing

• Practical experience with Docker and CI/CD 

• Prior experience with SQL databases such as PostgreSQL

• A security-focused mindset

• The eagerness to learn and explore new technologies

• A high sense of taking ownership

• Excitement to work in a fast-paced and dynamic startup environment

It’s nice if you have

• Experience building core services for API platforms

• Experience working in the Fintech domain

• Experience building microservice-based event driven distributed applications

Why Upvest?

We're working on solving a hard problem: fixing the European securities financial infrastructure that empowers more people to be able to invest. You have the opportunity to contribute to this change.

We invest in you. You get a learning development budget and plenty of opportunities to grow in your role.

We have a strong engineering culture encouraging knowledge sharing. Learn from our team members who present internally on various software engineering topics as well as internationally at various developer conferences.

We take hiring seriously with a strong focus on keeping a high bar when interviewing (equally important is that we hire decent people, who are passionate about their craft and helping us achieve our shared mission).

While we're not quite fully-remote, we are committed to being a flexible employer, as we understand you don't have to be in the office to do your best work.

We live a culture of empowerment, trust (that we hire the best people and get out of their way) and openness (there's a greater advantage in sharing information than keeping it to ourselves).

Our values

Learn and grow. We aim high to shape our future. We give and request honest feedback knowing that we develop together. Progression over Perfection.

Team first. We make it easy for others. We value our differences and are open to others' opinions. We win and celebrate together! Team over Egos.

Own the outcome. Whether we win or we lose, we stand together. We are proactive and get the job done. Outcome over Process.

Tell the story. We always start with the why. We share knowledge to empower others. Transparency over Complexity.

Upvest is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.