Principal Engineer (f/x/m)

💸 spotixx is a Frankfurt-based European FinTech building technology for the regulated financial sector. Since 2019, we have grown into a team of 60+ professionals with deep roots in the German and European banking landscape, shaped by years of hands-on experience in fraud investigation and financial crime prevention. We specialize in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and fraud detection, enabling secure, compliant data exchange between financial institutions. Using advanced data science and AI, we are helping shift the industry toward collaborative intelligence and more effective prevention. As a self-funded company, we focus on sustainable growth and real impact. With offices in Frankfurt and Wilhelmshaven and strong inbound demand, we are expanding our team. If you want to work on meaningful problems, grow with the company, and be part of a flexible, hybrid work environment, spotixx offers the opportunity to do just that.

Tasks

• Take ownership of the platform's systems design, including the architecture, data models, contracts, and integration boundaries, and the trade-offs behind them.
• Stay hands-on through the highest-risk parts of the build, and ship code the team learns from.
• Set the design standard: the architectural, security, and verification patterns the team builds to, and the design reviews that uphold them.
• Design for security and scale, building systems that withstand banking-grade load and scrutiny.
• Raise the technical output of the team through direction, design review, and pairing.
• Build AI leverage: agentic workflows with the evals and guardrails needed to ship reliably.
• Represent us technically with customers, including workshops and due diligence with bank architects, CISOs, and risk teams, in German and English.
• Partner with senior management and your manager on strategy and prioritisation.

Requirements

• A deeply experienced, hands-on technologist, typically with 8+ years building production software, able to own systems design and still ship code others learn from.
• Fluent in German and English, both essential for our engagement with German banks.
• Large-enterprise context: you have delivered systems inside a large corporate or for a vendor supplying one, and understand how enterprise architecture reviews, security assessments, and change control work.
• Excellent systems design skills, covering distributed systems, services, contracts, data, and integrations.
• AI-forward: you already use coding agents and AI-assisted building in your own work or personal projects.
• A track record of raising the engineers around you through influence, design review, and example.
• Senior-management maturity: you translate technical risk into terms the business can act on.
• Credible and calm when bank architects and risk functions question design choices.
• Security-minded: secure-by-design thinking, OAuth/OIDC, and data protection appropriate to banking.
• Rigorous about quality: you design for verifiability and verify rather than assume.
• Regulated-industry experience, with banking or FinTech a major bonus.
• Cloud experience: GCP preferred, with AWS or Azure also welcome, plus familiarity with IaC, containers, and CI/CD.
• Nice to have: Python/FastAPI, React/TypeScript, the GCP stack, privacy-enhancing technology or applied cryptography (MPC especially), multi-tenant SaaS, and the anti-financial-crime domain.

Benefits

💰 Attractive compensation.

🏠 Flexible hybrid work model (Frankfurt + home office within Germany).

🚀 High ownership and real impact from day one.

🏇 Flat structures that let the team move quickly.

🗺️ Collaborative, international team culture.

🦹 Work on high-impact products that help fight financial crime.

👷♀️ Own the architecture of our core data-sharing platform and build it hands-on.

🌈 We welcome applications from all qualified people, as diversity enriches us. Your perspective matters: regardless of gender, age, origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. Applicants with disabilities will be given preference when equally qualified.

We are looking forward to receiving your application!

spotixx, founded in 2019 by financial crime experts, is at the forefront of financial crime detection. Our AI‑driven data‑sharing platform enables banks and insurers to uncover cross‑institutional criminal networks and fraud patterns while keeping all data pseudonymized and secure. Through advanced Machine Learning, we deliver personalized, always‑current detection models that strengthen compliance and reduce manual workload.

Complementing our technology, spotixx operations provides tailored AML and fraud‑management services: from alert investigation and transaction analysis to resolution and complaint handling. Combining smart automation with expert decision‑making, we ensure reliable, efficient detection with minimal false positives.

With Confora Labs, we assess AI applications for fairness, robustness, cybersecurity, and EU AI Act compliance, creating transparency and trust in responsible AI.