🚀 We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone.
We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking.
After starting as a prepaid card, our product offering has grown a lot in the last 10 years in the UK. As well as personal and business bank accounts, we offer joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more exciting things to come beyond. Our UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with us.
With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers!
We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo ❤️
📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £135,000 - £184,000 + Share Options | Benefits | Technology
Senior Staff Engineer: L70 on our Engineering Progression Framework
About our Engineering Teams:
We have around 450 engineers out of roughly 5,000 people in total - and we have big ambitions. There are many interesting challenges ahead, and we're happy for people to move between teams or to specialise, whatever you prefer. As an engineer here you'd be able to work directly with anyone across the company, and we run regular knowledge-sharing sessions so you’ll learn heaps about everything from how banks work to effective communication.
We contribute to open source software as much as possible. Our blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do.
About Platform:
This role sits in our Platform collective. Our Platform team includes over 75 technical staff (Platform Engineers, Backend Engineers, ML Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Web Engineers, Analytics Engineers, and Data Scientists).
Our mission is to help Monzo scale effectively, empowering our technology teams to build magical experiences for our customers all over the world. We do this by providing a highly available, reliable, secure, compliant, and performant platform of data, software, and infrastructure solutions that:
meet the needs of our growing business
accelerate the productivity of Monzo engineers, data scientists, and data users
maintain cost-efficiency that is at most linear to the growth of our business
Senior Staff Engineer responsibilities:
A Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. You will have company-wide influence, working with other collectives to grow Monzo.
In this role you’ll be focused on improving our platform resilience. You’ll sit at the intersection of our platform and product engineering teams to make it easier for engineers to build resilient systems; improving our platform abstractions and tooling in the process.
More specifically, you’ll:
Expect to be hands on and deeply technical with code and infrastructure, using your software engineering and system building skills and expertise to lean in and solve deep technical challenges
Partner with the Engineering Director for Platform and other ICs to provide technical leadership around resiliency across Monzo
Build a deep understanding of our platform and then work to strengthen the reliability surface that sits between teams - building and enhancing the tools, patterns and guardrails that make resilient choices the easy ones
Promote and maintain a culture where every engineer feels supported to design, build and operate reliable systems that work on a global scale
Understand several work-streams across your group, keeping enough context to regularly provide technical advice and challenge to other engineers
Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems in the collective. You’ll do this in order to arrive at solutions that are robust and optimal given the context
Championing high standards by celebrating success and providing constructive feedback to help the team improve
Foster a culture of quality within your collective. Proactively champion measures to test work, and make this easy
Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers
🤩What we’re looking for…
To succeed in this role, you will need a strong background in both modern platform tooling and practical software development.
Software engineering foundations. You have significant professional experience in software engineering, demonstrated by writing, testing, and deploying robust backend services using strongly typed languages.
Cloud and container experience. You have hands-on experience working with AWS and/or GCP, and you are proficient with Kubernetes. We’re looking for someone with deep experience designing and maintaining global, resilient systems in the cloud.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code. You are naturally inclined to solve problems through automation and have experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).
System curiosity: You are deeply curious about systems, enjoy diving deep to investigate complex issues, and understand how modern distributed applications fail and scale.
Platform mindset: You're excited to build a platform that enables success for everyone at Monzo, focusing on reliability, performance, and developer experience.
Comfort with Ambiguity: You're comfortable working in a fast-paced team that deals with ambiguity and evolving requirements.
What you’ll be using/ What you’ll be working on:
We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:
Go to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial here)
Cassandra for most persistent data storage
Kafka for our asynchronous message queue
Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services
AWS for most of our production infrastructure and GCP for most of our data infrastructure.
React for internal Web dashboards
Feast for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.
🤩We’d love to hear from you if…
You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products
You have technically led large teams to solve complex product challenges and manage trade-offs.
You have experience working on Backend Systems, Data-intensive systems or real-world ML deployments
You want to be involved in building and protecting a product that you (and over 13 million others) use
You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you make data-informed decisions
You’re comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and partner team resolve that ambiguity
🙌What’s in it for you
💰£135,000 - £184,000 ➕ share options + benefits
✈️ We’ll help you relocate to the UK.
✅ We can sponsor your visa.
📍This role can be based in our London office, but we're open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London)
⏰We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, and at times that suit you and your team.
📚£1,000 learning budget each year to use on books, training courses and conferences.
🏡We will set you up to work from home; all employees are given Macbooks and for fully remote workers we will provide extra support for your work-from-home setup.
➕ Plus lots more! Read our full list of benefits.
🌈 The application journey has 4 key steps
Our interview process involves four main stages after an informal recruiter call:
Recruiter Call
Initial Call
System Design Interview
Take home task or pair coding exercise
Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview
This process should take around 3-4 weeks - your schedule is really important to us, so we promise to be as flexible as possible!
One of our senior staff engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.
#LI-Remote
#LI-ZM
Equal opportunities for everyone
Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2024 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2024 Gender Pay Gap Report.
We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.
If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage 😊