Senior Elasticsearch Engineer (Contract) at Computational Theoretical Chemist II

About us

GoCardless is a global bank payment company. Over 100,000 businesses, from start-ups to household names, use GoCardless to collect and send payments through direct debit, real-time payments and open banking.

GoCardless processes US$130bn+ of payments annually, across 30+ countries; helping customers collect and send both recurring and one-off payments, without the chasing, stress or expensive fees. We use AI- powered solutions to improve payment success and reduce fraud. And, with open banking connectivity to over 2,500 banks, we help our customers make faster, more informed decisions.

We are headquartered in the UK with offices in London and Leeds, and additional locations in Australia, France, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal and the United States.

At GoCardless, we're all about supporting you! We’re committed to making our hiring process inclusive and accessible. If you need extra support or adjustments, reach out to your Talent Partner — we’re here to help!

And remember: we don’t expect you to meet every single requirement. If you’re excited by this role, we encourage you to apply!

The role

This position is a day rate contract role that will last for 3 months, with the possibility of extending to 6 months. You will lead the engineering work that underpins search in our merchant dashboard — the primary interface through which thousands of businesses manage their customers and payments on GoCardless.

Search is a critical workflow for our merchants. Whether they’re locating a specific customer, tracking down a payment, or reconciling transactions, they rely on search to get to the right information quickly. You will design and implement a robust, high-quality search solution that meets these needs: relevant, fast, and resilient at scale.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will work closely with our Product Engineering and Platform teams, contributing production-ready code and pairing with engineers throughout the engagement. A key measure of success will be how well-equipped the team is to maintain and evolve the system after you leave.

What you bring

Deep hands- on experience building and operating Elasticsearch clusters in production environments, and you’re comfortable working across the full stack from cluster configuration through to Query DSL and index design
Operational maturity — you design with observability in mind from the outset and know how to monitor cluster health, detect and respond to failures
Cloud platform experience — you have worked with managed Elasticsearch deployments on a major cloud provider and understand what changes when moving away from self-managed infrastructure
A track record of leaving teams more capable — through documentation, code review, or targeted workshops, you make complex systems understandable to engineers who will maintain them after you move on
Strong programming skills in Ruby

Salary: £600 per day

(some of) The good stuff

Wellbeing \- stay healthy with dedicated support and medical cover
Work away scheme \- gives you the option to work away from your country of residence for up to 90 days in any 12 month period
Adaptive Working \- allows you to work flexibly, around your lifestyle
Equity \- all permanently employed GCs get equity to help you make a valuable contribution
Parental leave \- to suit everyone embarking on life's great adventure
Learning Budget \- lead your own development with an annual learning budget
Time off \- generous holiday allowance, + 3 annual volunteer days, + 4 annual business-wide wellness days (‘GC Fridays’)

Life at GoCardless

We're an organisation defined by our values; We start with why before we begin any project, to ensure it’s aligned with our mission. We act with integrity, always. We care deeply about what we do and we know it's essential that we be humble whilst we do it. Working this way creates the GC magic- the reason we all love showing up to work.

Diversity & Inclusion

We’re building the bank payment network of the future and our ambition is to move money anywhere, for anything, for anyone. If we’re going to achieve this goal, we need to build a team of ‘GeeCee’s’ that is as wonderfully diverse as the world we live in - with a multitude of perspectives, experiences & backgrounds.

We've got a long way to go, but here's how we're doing as of 2025:

Female Employees – 44%

Ethnic background – 25%

Identify as LGBTQIA+ – 9%

Neurodivergent – 9%

Disabled – 1%

We’re rooting for you during your application and GoCardless aims to provide reasonable adjustments to make our recruitment process as remarkable and accessible as we can. Please speak to your Talent Partner if you need extra support.

If you want to learn more, you can read about our Employee Resource Groups and objectives here as well as our latest D&I Report

Sustainability

We’re committed to reducing our impact on the environment, leaving a more sustainable world for future generations. In 2021 we became co-founders of the Tech Zero coalition, a group of businesses committed to taking climate action as part of the UNFCCC Race to Zero. We aim to reduce our impact and to create positive change on the natural world. Check out our sustainability action plan here.

Find out more about Life at GoCardless via Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Computational Theoretical Chemist II

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