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.

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.

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