Senior Engineering Manager - Decision Intelligence

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.

The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Decision Intelligence team at Pleo. Decision Intelligence owns Pleo's real-time fraud, AML and risk decisioning: when a Pleo card is used, this team's systems decide, in milliseconds, whether the transaction is legitimate. Every decision is a live trade-off between stopping fraud and letting a genuine customer spend, made under real latency and regulatory constraints against adversaries who constantly adapt. It's some of the highest-stakes engineering at Pleo.

Our ambition is to build a best-in-class fraud and risk capability: fast, accurate, explainable, and powered by clean data and machine learning at scale. This is a senior leadership role built to grow. You'll start by leading Decision Intelligence as a single team, but the area is set to expand into several teams spanning machine learning, real-time decisioning, and risk operations. We want someone with the seniority and ambition to lead that expansion and scale with it.

What you'll be doing

As Senior Engineering Manager for Decision Intelligence, you will:

• Own the delivery, quality, and technical direction of the fraud and risk decisioning platform, and the health and velocity of the team (or teams) that build it.
• Set the technical vision for how Pleo detects and prevents fraud: a data and ML-driven decisioning capability that is fast, accurate, and explainable at scale.
• Build a focused, high-performing team with clear ownership, sharp priorities, and a strong engineering culture.
• Directly manage, mentor, and grow the engineers and tech leads, setting clear competency expectations and growth paths for each person.
• Drive AI-native ways of working: set the standards for how AI tools are used, and stay accountable for the quality and safety of AI-assisted work in a fintech context (verification, audit trails, explainability).
• Partner with Compliance, Risk, and Security leadership, keeping clear lines between real-time fraud detection and financial-crime governance.

• Shape the organisation as it scales, growing Decision Intelligence into multiple teams and defining the specialist roles it hires next.

What you bring

You'll thrive in this role if you have:

• A track record of leading and growing engineering teams as an Engineering Manager or Senior Engineering Manager, with clear ownership of delivery health and people development.

• Domain judgment in fraud, risk, financial crime, trust & safety, or another real-time, high-stakes decisioning domain, and an understanding of what makes it hard: latency budgets, false-positive/false-negative trade-offs, adversarial change, and regulatory weight. Direct fraud or risk experience is a strong advantage; a genuine feel for the domain and a proven ability to get deep quickly matter just as much.
• Enough technical depth to set direction credibly and challenge it well, including data pipelines, model-driven decisioning, and the infrastructure (clean data through to graph and ML, streaming and batch architectures, MLOps) a modern fraud capability is built on.
• Sound judgment on build-vs-buy: knowing when to leverage vendors versus invest in in-house capability, especially for high-stakes, regulated systems.
• A genuine passion for people management and coaching, and the conviction that promotion is earned by operating at level, not handed out to retain.
• High proficiency with AI-enhanced development tools (such as GitHub Copilot or Claude) and a history of championing AI-native ways of working within a team.
• Willingness to keep deepening your AI fluency (workflows and craft) as Pleo scales AI adoption across the entire company.

• Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication, able to explain fraud and risk trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Who you'll be working with and reporting to

You'll report to the Director of Engineering for Payments, and work most closely with the Product Manager for Decision Intelligence. As a fraud and risk domain, you'll also partner with our fraud, security, compliance, and risk leadership. Decision Intelligence sits within Pleo's broader Payments organisation, with regular touchpoints across the payments and platform teams whose data and flows feed fraud decisioning.

How you'll develop in this role

In your first six months at Pleo, you'll:

• Get deep into how real-time fraud decisioning works end-to-end, from authorisation through to the data and models behind each decision.

• Establish clear ownership, sharp priorities, and a strong delivery culture within the team.
• Build relationships across product, compliance, security, analysts, and the other teams the domain depends on.
• Shape the team's future, contributing to the fraud-platform direction and the specialist roles it hires next.

As Decision Intelligence scales into multiple teams, we're committed to supporting your growth into a broader fraud and risk engineering leadership role.

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office
• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far
• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work

Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what we’re looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success!

Last time we hired a similar role, we received a vast number of applications but only a few were selected for an intro call. Some of the key reasons why previous candidates didn’t make it past the application screening stage include:

• CV writing and content: we receive a lot of CVs, and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI—it’s a big focus for us internally too—but without human intervention, these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What we're really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you know from your previous experience. A top tip from us is to use the “Achieved X, as measured by Y, by doing Z” formula (credit: Laszlo Bock, ~2014) to give a really clear picture of what you’ve worked on. A final note: including links to your previous companies' websites is a huge help and allows us to truly understand your background!
• Application care: every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes, hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates' efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully, they make a huge difference in our decision-making process.
• Profile to role fit: highlight most important aspects of the role, points that might get misunderstood, any specific industry requirements etc

About your application

• English first. Since it's our company language, please submit your application in English. You’ll be using it a lot if you join us.
• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly, we only accept applications through our system—our support team can’t pass on calls or emails.
• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply, even if you don't tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us.
• Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format, email belonging@pleo.io. We’ll design a process that works for you.
• Your data is safe. When you apply, we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data, read our Privacy Policy here.
• Applying for multiple roles? Nothing is stopping you, and we assess every role independently. However, we do look for alignment, so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.
• Reapplying. If you’re applying for the same role again, please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.