Thought Machine jobs, judged for you, free

What they do

Thought Machine builds core banking and payments systems that run in the cloud. Its products are Vault Core, a real-time ledger, and Vault Payments. Its clients are global banks, regional banks, and fintechs. It started in London in 2014. Postings say it has more than 550 people and raised more than £500m.

What they value

• Solve hard problems at the root cause, and do not take shortcuts.
• Work in person. The careers page says the company thrives in person.
• Take direct ownership, with real responsibility from day one.
• Debate with an open mind, then commit. Job titles do not win arguments.
• High trust and radical transparency, where the best idea wins.
• Every employee is a shareholder.

Where they hire

Of 40 Postings, London has 17, Lisbon 15, Singapore 5, New York 2, and Bangkok 1. The board marks 34 as hybrid, 5 as on site, and the Bangkok role as remote. Most Lisbon Postings require four office days a week. One London Posting requires three. No Posting mentions visa sponsorship or the right to work.

Teams and roles

The board has 40 Postings in four departments. Engineering has 28 of them.

• Product engineering: software, back end, and full stack engineers from Software Engineer to Senior Software Engineer II, plus engineering managers.
• Infrastructure and run engineering: infrastructure engineers, a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, and cloud support engineers in London and Singapore.
• Security: seven Postings, six in Lisbon, for application security, cloud security, and security control engineers, plus a manager in London.
• Developer platform: engineering managers for the AI platform and for provisioning.
• Programme management: a Technical Programme Manager and an Engineering Programme Manager in the office of the CTO.
• Client services: eight Postings for client success directors, forward deployed engineers, and a Solutions Architect, in Singapore, New York, London, and Bangkok.
• Finance and strategy: a Payroll Specialist, a Strategy Associate, and a Strategy Lead in London.
• Product: one Senior Product Manager in Lisbon.

What they look for

Engineering Postings ask for Go or Python and for experience with large cloud-native systems. Most technical Postings name Kubernetes, and many name AWS or GCP. The site reliability, cloud support, and infrastructure forward deployed roles also ask for automation tools such as Terraform or Ansible. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer joins a global on-call rotation.

Senior engineers must own problems of unclear scope from start to finish, investigate issues in production, and mentor other engineers. Engineering managers must stay hands-on with code reviews and technical work.

Security control roles ask for experience with security controls in cloud infrastructure and with automation in Python or Go. Certifications such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and PCI-DSS are a plus.

Client roles ask for experience with core banking programs at a vendor or a bank, and for the skill to work with senior bank staff. Two client success roles require fluent Thai. Forward deployed engineers travel to client sites for up to 25% of their time.

The Senior Product Manager role asks for 5 or more years of product management and comfort with API-driven products. The Strategy Associate role prefers a background in strategy consulting or business operations at a high-growth technology company.

About half of the Postings list knowledge of banking or financial services as desirable, not essential. Every Posting asks people to apply even if their experience does not match the description exactly.