Backend Engineer - Ruby on Rails

Are you looking to have an impact on the daily life of millions of entrepreneurs in France and Europe?

Do you thrive in a trustful, fast-paced environment?

Do you feel like our Engineering principles are aligned with your vision ?

Then Pennylane might be the right place for you — and you, might be the perfect fit for this role 🙂

Our vision

We aim to become the most beloved financial Operating System of European SMEs.

We help business owners get rid of the time consuming hassle of handling accounting and finance, while giving them access to key information that they can use to make better decisions.

Meanwhile, we’re helping accountants. By using Pennylane, rather than doing manual and repetitive tasks, they can spend more time advising and guiding their clients.

About us

Pennylane is one of the fastest growing Fintechs in France (and soon to be in Europe!)

In 3 years of existence, we’ve managed to :

💻 Make ourselves known as a groundbreaking accounting and financial software for small businesses and their accountants

💰 Raise a total of €84 millions, including from Sequoia 🌲, the famous fund from the Silicon Valley who invested early in companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, Paypal and much more...

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Grow from 7 cofounders to 350+ happy Pennylaners : we’re now recognized as one of the greatest places to work in France (but also remotely), with a 5/5 rating on Glassdoor and an e-NPS of 94.

🌍 Build an international environment with more than 26 nationalities, with a strong remote-friendly culture, where 30% of the employees are already working from all parts of Europe

🤝 Earn the trust of thousands of customers and accounting firms and obtain outstanding ratings

WHY this position is of utmost importance to reach our mission

While some companies count on marketing and sales to gain market share, we are a product-led company and we are investing primarily on building an innovative and scalable platform. Tech teams have a crucial role to play to achieve this goal.

HOW you will contribute to the company as a Software Engineer

As a Software Engineer, you would will be part of a 140+ people Tech organisation. Each engineer is part of a squad focussing on a part of the product, reporting to a Team Lead or an Engineering Manager.

Each squad is made with all the skills needed to build features end to end in autonomy, you will be working daily with a product manager, a designer and software engineers.

As a Software Engineer you will take part of the discovery phase of the projects with the Product Manager and Designer to define the feature to build; then you will participate with other engineers to design the software architecture, build it, test it and release it to production.

The squad is also working on supporting customers using the features built by monitoring and fixing issues in production.

WHAT you can expect from your life at Pennylane

Within one month :

- You will learn everything about our company, our teams, and our vision during the first onboarding week.

- You will follow a tech onboarding training to get familiar with the application, the accounting concepts, the code stack (we use Ruby 3, Ruby on Rails 7, AWS, React, TypeScript) and the CI/CD and have full autonomy with it.

- You are integrated in your squad and explained your squad scope, roles and responsibilities.

- You will have a “tech buddy”, another engineer, helping you on a daily basis with all the technical details you need to know at Pennylane.

- You will start working on what we call “good first issues” to get familiar with the dev environment, the code structure, the tools and the squad scopes.

Within 3-6 months :

- You’ll contribute to meaningful new features or improvements in your team’s scope

- You’ll have the opportunity to improve on our tools and processes to help us achieve better quality and/or velocity

- You’ll be included in at least once code review specialist group to decide and improve the adoption of our best practices on one topic (e.g. testing, code architecture, database migrations, etc)

- You’ll start looking into quantitative and qualitative product feedback to sharpen the team’s roadmap

And beyond :

- The teams are growing, there are plenty of opportunity to grow and develop your skills as a software engineer.

- You will be able to take ownership and gain responsibilities on some features or projects the squad is responsible for.

- You will have the possibility to have impact at Pennylane scale by working on cross teams or transversal initiatives.

- You will participate in scaling the Pennylane application from 30k+ customers to millions customers.

What do we do to make your work life easier

🏢 You'll be able to work remotely from anywhere in Europe, as long as your contract allows you to

💵 You’ll have a compensation package

📈 You'll get company shares to enjoy a piece of the success story you're building with us

🏡 You’ll have a budget to turn your home into a more comfortable workspace, as well as a monthly allowance to work from a coworking space whenever you feel like it

⛹️Through our partner Gymlib, you’ll have access to 8000 fitness spaces in Europe and more than 300 activities related to wellness

🇬🇧 You’ll have access to Busuu to perfect your english or your french

💻 You’ll get the latest Apple equipment

🎉 You’ll be part of a vibrant social community : we do lots of sports together (Foot, running, climbing...), we love to hang out and have a drink together (thursday afterwork drinks on our rooftop is a usual thing. Twice-a-year we do company seminars, last time we went on a trip to the French Alps and it was fabulous !)

And.. If you're based in France :

🏢 You’ll be able to work fully from your home or any co-working space in France, or from our wonderful office in the center of Paris

🏝You’ll get 10 additional days off (to the 25 standard ones) to rest and do what you love each year

🍜 You’ll have lunch credits (Swile card) to buy your favorite food every day

🏥 You’ll have a great healthcare cover (Alan Blue) to take care of yourself and your family

We're working on providing those last advantages to our people based outside of France as well, but it can be quite more complex depending on different countries.

What does the recruitment process look like ? 

- You will first have a general chat with a Talent Acquisition Manager - 30 min

- You’ll then have a test-home assignment + a debriefing session with one of our engineers (Karine/Alejandro/Alexandre/Lucas) - 45 min

- You’ll have a last discussion with Quentin de Metz (CTO & Co-Founder) or Thierry Deo (Lead Developer & Co-Founder) - 1 h

We make sure we move fast ; you can expect the recruitment process with us to last between 15 and 25 days in total. 

Who are we looking for ?

You may have noticed that there was no section listing the skills or qualities required to apply for this specific job. Researches have shown that some people are less likely to apply than others, if they don’t feel like they meet the full list of criteria. So we have decided to take it down entirely.

We have tried to give you as much details as we could about the purpose, missions and environment of this role; it is now up to you to tell us if you think this is a position in which you could a) have fun and b) bring value to our company.

If you’re hesitating, we encourage you to apply anyway: worst case scenario, you might lose a few minutes, and in the best case, it will be the start of a meaningful and long-lasting collaboration.

We also want to emphasise that we fully embrace diversity and that we’re doing our best to create a safe and inclusive environment. We are committed to providing an equal employment opportunity regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disabilities, or any other traits that make you who you are. If anything, diversity makes us a more fun place to work at.

To end with a humble illustration of our commitment, we’ve recently signed the Pacte Parité to set concrete goals in building a better and more inclusive workplace in the years to come.