Highlighted company: Thought Machine

No single role on cord has been messaged more often than Thought Machine's Senior Back End Engineer. 693 conversations, and every engineer who got in touch heard back.

Thought Machine first joined cord in 2017, and that habit of answering everyone has held the whole way through. Here is who they are, and why the engineers they hire tend to stay.

Who Thought Machine are

Thought Machine was founded in London in 2014 by Paul Taylor. They build the core banking technology that banks run their accounts and payments on, designed from day one to run in the cloud.

More than 65 banks across over 30 countries use their platform, including JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered and Intesa Sanpaolo. In August 2026 Deutsche Bank chose Thought Machine for a ten year partnership, and in September they announced a collaboration with AWS to help banks move off decades old systems faster.

Around 530 people work there, across London, New York, Singapore, Lisbon, Miami, Sydney and Melbourne. More than 60% of the company works in engineering and product.

How they perform on cord

The numbers below are from cord, on 6 October 2026.

• 693 conversations on a single role, Senior Back End Engineer. More than any other position on cord.

• A 100% response rate. Every engineer who messaged got a reply.

• 948 conversations started by their recruitment team across their time on cord.

• On cord since 2017.

Response rate isn't something a company can game on cord. Either the team replies or it doesn't, and the engineers who get in touch find out either way. Thought Machine replies.

Why engineers stay once they get there

Thought Machine describes itself as an engineering led company, and the detail backs that up.

Every employee is a shareholder. Everyone who joins gets a stake in the company they are building.

Engineering is most of the company. More than 60% of people work in engineering and product. Their stated values include owning your area outright, without being micromanaged, and debating openly before committing to a decision together.

The work sits underneath some of the world's largest banks. The stack is Go, Python, React and TypeScript, running on Kubernetes across Google Cloud, AWS and Azure.

You can work across the world. Secondments and transfers are open between their hubs in London, New York, Singapore and Lisbon, where a new office opened this autumn.

The package, in plain numbers. 25 days holiday plus bank holidays. Pension matched up to 5%. Life insurance at three times salary. Six months fully paid maternity leave and four weeks fully paid paternity leave. Flexible hours, a personal learning budget, cycle to work, an electric car scheme, a season ticket loan, two charity days a year and a weekly food pop up in the office.

The team doing the hiring

Seven people from Thought Machine have access to the account, and between them they have started 948 conversations with engineers on cord.

• Charles Self, Recruitment Partner. 558 conversations, the most of anyone on the account.

• Glen Boom, Recruitment Partner. 240 conversations since joining the account in November 2025.

• Dominique Goncalves, Recruitment Partner. 90 conversations.

• Alex Duffy, Director of Recruitment, who first brought Thought Machine onto cord in 2017.

They are hiring more than 100 engineers this year across London and Lisbon.

Highlighted Companies is a series of hand picked companies on cord. Data sourced from cord, October 2026.