Senior Backend Engineer, Security Tooling

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £100,000 - £140,000 + Benefits | Technology - Engineering  

About us: 

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 Team:

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
• Elasticsearch for storing and analysing events;
• We also have two physical datacenter sites with actual cables to connect to various third parties

Your day-to-day   

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Staff Security & Detection squad, building the internal security products that help us keep Monzonauts secure, and enable us to quickly detect and remediate threats.

You’ll help us with the following questions and challenges:

• Supercharging our Security Operations team by building forward thinking, innovative Security Products, both from scratch and through integrating Open Source and third party software with our platform;
• Enabling staff to work securely and productively by building innovative, native security controls on their devices without introducing friction;
• Thinking innovatively about how we can leverage our wider platform to build truly cutting-edge, accurate tools to detect and remediate threats;
• How to leverage strong device identity controls to enable a VPNless future.

Here are some of the projects the team have worked on recently:

• Automatically detecting and blocking suspicious applications and binaries from executing on our fleet.
• Building and maintaining a highly performant in-house Security Information and Event Management product that processes millions of events per minute, enabling our Security Operations team to investigate and respond to suspicious behaviour within seconds.
• Building strong device identity controls that enable us to authenticate both the user and device taking actions on our platform.
• Implementing novel, low friction ways of stopping sensitive data from leaving our devices or platform.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Developing innovative new security-focused products, both from the ground up and through integrating with existing parts of our platform.
• Thinking like an attacker to develop our in-house detection capabilities.
• Working closely with engineers and security specialists across our other Security squads on a daily basis, such as Security Infrastructure, Security Platform, Information Security and most importantly our Security Operations Centre.

Monzo’s security engineering teams have a wide range of responsibilities. As a bank, we are solving diverse, novel problems to ensure that our staff, customers and data are secure.

Our main guiding principle is that security at the expense of user experience is a last resort. We aim to move mountains in the background so that we can continue building world-class features and products, without compromising on security.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you’d be able to work directly with lots of teams across the company, and we run regular knowledge-sharing sessions so you’ll learn heaps about everything; from how banks work to effective communication and the technologies we use.

You should apply if:

• 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
• you’re interested in distributed systems and writing resilient software
• you have some experience with strongly-typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.).
• you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing
• you’re passionate about security and understand, or want to learn more about best practices.
• you’re excited about identifying, investigating and addressing gaps in our detection, alerting & response tooling, continually improving our capabilities.

The Interview Process:

Our interview process involves three main stages: 

1. Recruiter Call
2. Initial Call 
3. Take home task or pair coding exercise 
4. Final interview including a system design and a behavioural interview 

Our average process takes around 2-3 weeks but we will always work around your availability. 

You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions or want to talk through reasonable adjustments ahead of or during application please us at any point on tech-hiring@monzo.com 

One of our engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.

What’s in it for you:

💰 £100,000 - £140,000 base salary➕ plus stock options 

✈️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 Backend 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,  2022 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2021 Gender Pay Gap Report.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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