Lead Engineer (Fintech)

Location: Milan, Italy; most teams meet in the office 2–3 days per week

Salary: €72,950–€108,045 EUR annually

Company

Klarna is building an everyday finance network serving over 120 million consumers across 26 countries.

What you will do

• Make defensible technical decisions, document trade-offs, and explain rejected alternatives.
• Design and own systems that move money at scale, considering architecture, failure propagation, and load-related risks.
• Connect technical choices to business outcomes and right-size solutions to their actual value.
• Design for the reliability, auditability, and control requirements of a regulated bank.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical standard across multiple teams.
• Set practical standards for using AI in everyday engineering work.

Requirements

• Experience building and operating reliable, high-performance systems at scale.
• Strong experience in Java, JavaScript, or Python environments.
• Ability to make and clearly communicate technical and business trade-offs.
• Ability to explain complex systems to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience moving initiatives forward across several teams without formal authority.
• Experience learning from production incidents and improving systems afterwards.

Nice to have

• Non-traditional professional or technical background.
• Experience in a capability or domain that is not currently represented at Klarna.

Culture & Benefits

• Co-located collaboration with office attendance varying by team.
• Work on financial systems with reliability and performance demands at large scale.
• Opportunities to influence architecture, engineering standards, and cross-team practices.
• Diverse skills, perspectives, and backgrounds are welcomed.