Staff Engineer, Borrowing

Monzo (View all Jobs)

Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

Please mention No Whiteboard if you apply!
I'm a one-man team looking to improve tech interviews, and could use any support! 😄


Interview Process

1. Phone interview 2. Take-home, & call to discuss it 3. 2-3 hours of on-site interviews (systems/behavioural)

Programming Languages Mentioned

JavaScript, Golang, Java


:round_drawing_pin:London / UK Remote | :moneybag: £140,000 - £180,000 + Benefits | Technology - Engineering

About us: 

At Monzo we’re aiming to build the control centre for peoples financial lives. We are always keen to hear from capable, creative engineers who want to help us accomplish that goal 🚀

We’re here to make money work for everyone and we're doing things differently. For too long, banking has been obtuse, complex and opaque.

We want to change that and build a bank with everyone, for everyone. Our amazing community suggests features, test the app and give us constant feedback so we can build something everyone loves.

We're focused on solving problems, rather than selling financial products. We want to make the world a better place and change people's lives through Monzo.

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 200 engineers out of roughly 2,000 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.

What you’ll be using: 

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
  • Envoy Proxy for RPC
  • Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services 
  • AWS for most of our infrastructure
  • React for internal web dashboards
  • We also have two physical datacenter sites with actual cables to connect to various third parties

Your day-to-day:

A Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Staff Engineer in the Borrowing collective at Monzo, you’ll:

  • Work with the product leadership team of your collective to ensure we are making the right trade-offs across squads. You’ll use your keen sense of product market fit to do this.
  • Help your teams manage the trade-offs implied in shipping new product to market - balancing speed, polish and the need to learn what fits customers’ needs best.
  • Rally your team around a mission, objective or company priority, injecting urgency when needed or slowing down pace to make sure the right controls are in place.
  • Understand several work-streams across your group keeping enough context to regularly provide technical advice 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.
  • Keep a high bar for technical excellence in the collective, through your own work, highlighting the work of others and calling out when things haven’t quite met the bar.
  • Foster a culture of quality within the collective. Proactively championing measures to test work, and get buy-in from stakeholders when this is not appreciated. 
  • Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers.

The Borrowing collective makes borrowing money simple, fair and transparent. 

We’re really proud that this fair approach to lending helps people to get what they want from life on their own terms. Squads in Borrowing have already shipped and scaled Loans and Overdrafts to hundreds of thousands of Monzo customers. They’ve made it easy to take out a loan without the unfair fees or confusing pricing that you find elsewhere. We've most recently launched a completely new product, Flex: a consumer focused buy now pay later product that is growing rapidly - providing a simple and clear way of using instalment loans. Borrowing teams work on everything from the way borrowing works in the app, right down to how they move and account for money that our customers borrow. They are extremely customer focused and start most of their work by understanding customers and their actual needs.

You should apply if: 

  • you have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products.
  • you have technically led teams to solve complex product challenges, enabling them to manage trade-offs in order to deliver products that solve customer needs at scale.
  • you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product.
  • you want to be involved in building a product that you (and the people you know) use every day.
  • you have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to 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.
  • you have experience building and developing distributed systems and writing resilient software
  • you have significant experience working with more than one programming language, at least one of which is strongly typed (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.)
  • you have experience coaching and growing senior and junior Engineers.
  • you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing.

Logistics

💰Salary is around £140,000 - £180,000 plus stock options and other benefits.

✈️We can help you relocate to the UK 

✅We can sponsor visas.

📍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, at times that suit you and your team.

📚Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses and conferences

➕And much more, see our full list of benefits here 

We're usually always hiring for Engineers, so there's no closing date for this job.


Equal Opportunity Statement

We are actively creating an equitable environment for every Monzonaut to thrive.

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, embracing diversity in all of its forms and 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,  2021 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2022 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.


#LI-Remote #LI-LW1

Please mention No Whiteboard if you apply!
I'm a one-man team looking to improve tech interviews, and could use any support! 😄


Get weekly alerts of new jobs from companies not using whiteboard interviews!