Senior Product Engineer (Contract, 3 Months)

You’ll be working alongside a small engineering team that owns everything end to end: the development lifecycle, system architecture and the infrastructure it all runs on.

You’ll need to be productive quickly: picking up an established codebase, understanding the domain and shipping production changes within your first couple of weeks.

📅 Duration: 3 months, starting ASAP

💷 Rate: £600–£650/day

📋 IR35: Outside

📍 Location: Brick Lane

What you’ll work on

Deliver features and improvements across our Scala microservices, spanning payments, core banking and rewards.

Build event-driven integrations with Kafka, internal services and external partners.

Improve the reliability, performance and test coverage of the services you work on.

Where needed, deliver changes in our React Native mobile app.

Leave things better than you found them, with clear documentation and handover of the work you deliver.

Our Stack

Backend: Scala microservices on the Typelevel ecosystem (Http4s, Cats Effect)

Data & messaging: AlloyDB and Kafka

Infrastructure: GCP and Kubernetes

Frontend: React Native mobile app, Next.js webapp

AI tooling: AI coding tools are widely used and actively encouraged, including Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.

You're a great fit if you

✅ Have deep, production Scala experience: You know functional Scala well, ideally on the Typelevel stack (Cats Effect, Http4s, fs2).

✅ Understand distributed systems: You have strong experience with microservices, RESTful APIs and Kafka or similar event-driven architectures.

✅ Ramp up fast: You have a track record of joining existing teams and codebases and delivering quickly.

✅ Bring React Native experience (bonus): You can ship mobile features comfortably, even if the backend is your main strength.

✅ Have fintech or payments experience (bonus): You’ve worked in regulated environments, card payments or banking systems.

✅ Use AI tools well: You use AI to accelerate delivery without compromising quality.

✅ Own quality: You treat automated testing as part of the job.

You won’t be a great fit if you

👎 Need a long onboarding period or detailed specs before you can contribute.

👎 Only want to work in one narrow part of the stack.

👎 Chase technical perfection over delivering value within a fixed engagement.

What’s it like working at Yonder?

🏢 We’re office-first, remote-friendly

We’re based in our Shoreditch office, complete with dog visitors and plenty of comfortable space to do your best work. We ask you to come into the office at least 3 days a week, with everyone coming in on Mondays.

🤍 We take a values-led approach

Our principles are incredibly important to us, so we recommend you check them out here: Our DNA

The process:

We know contractors move quickly, so we do too.

Stage 1: Intro call (30 mins). A video call with Harry Jell, our CTO; to cover the engagement, your experience and availability.

Stage 2: Technical interview (90 mins). A deep dive into your Scala experience and past projects, plus a system design exercise. This will be in-person at our Shoreditch office.

Decision. We aim to give you a decision within 24 hours.

Other things to know:

Because we’re FCA-regulated and handle sensitive customer data, we complete right to work, criminal record, politically exposed person and credit default checks before the engagement starts.