Staff Backend Engineer

📍New York, NY | 💰Staff Backend Engineer L60 | $221,000 - $299,000 + Benefits | Technology - Engineering | 

At Monzo, we’re building the future of digital banking - one that puts people first, not fees. We believe money should work for everyone, helping you grow, save, and spend in ways that actually fit your life.

We started in the UK and became one of the most loved digital banks, trusted by millions. Now, we’re bringing that same energy, innovation, and heart to the US, empowering people to take control of their finances with clarity, simplicity, and confidence.

Our US team is on a mission to make digital banking that grows your money, your way. Whether it’s cashback rewards that fit your real habits, high-yield savings with no hidden catches, or smart budgeting tools that simplify life, everything we build is designed to lift people up, not trip them up

But what truly sets Monzo apart isn’t just our product - it’s our people. We’re a team of builders, problem-solvers, and big thinkers united by a shared belief that finance can (and should) be fair, transparent, and empowering. We care deeply about the work we do and the impact it has on real people’s lives.

If you’re ready to make a difference and help build a bank that rewards people for being themselves, come join us. Let’s grow together.

About Us

Monzo Group is a leading financial technology company, with over 13 million customers in the UK, committed to providing modern banking solutions. In the last few years, we’ve built a banking app that our customers love – with extremely high daily engagement, an industry leading net promoter score, and award-winning customer support. We’ve raised over $1 billion from Capital G, Google’s growth fund, Ribbit Capital, TenCent, YCombinator, Stripe, Coatue, and others - most recently at a $5.9 billion valuation in 2024.

We’re just getting started in the US. We’re an agile full stack team operating like an early stage startup but with the financial, operational, and engineering platform muscle of a larger company. We’re focused on building an amazing US product, shipping and iterating quickly, and deepening our product market fit. We’re looking for highly driven, enterprising people to help us achieve our mission to make money work for everyone.

About our Engineering Team:

We are a team of 20 engineers working in a startup environment and on a mission to make digital banking work for everyone in the US. We have big ambitions for the future, and technology plays a big role in creating a bank our customers want. Engineers at Monzo collaborate across disciplines to solve interesting challenges throughout the company.

These range from the products our customers use everyday to underlying infrastructure, security, payments and finance, customer operations, financial crime, and data, to name just a few areas. There is scope for impact across a huge number of opportunities.

Your day-to-day   

You’ll act as a multiplier for the engineering team, setting the technical direction, designing scalable systems and ensuring we ship fast without compromising on safety or quality. You’ll work closely with engineering and product counterparts in both the US and UK, adapting core capabilities to the needs of US customers. In this role, you’ll be hands-on with writing and reviewing code, leading architectural thinking, and making pragmatic technical trade-offs.

A key part of your impact will come from raising the bar across the team. You’ll mentor engineers at all levels, helping them deepen their technical judgement while shaping a culture of excellence, inclusion and autonomy. You’ll coach others through complex problems, help them grow into technical leaders in their own right and ensure US engineering remains fast, safe and joyful to build in. Your influence will reach beyond your own code: your practices, decisions and communication will set standards for the entire US engineering organisation.

You’ll be deeply embedded in shaping the future of Monzo US. Working closely with the Head of Engineering, product leaders and cross-functional partners, you’ll help define how we build a differentiated US experience, how we scale responsibly and how we make technical decisions that balance customer impact, operational effectiveness and long-term platform health. You’ll bring clarity to ambiguity, communicate decisions effectively across teams and guide the organisation through complex technical landscapes.

How we work 💻:

Locations & Flexible Working: 

Our main tech hub is in New York, but our engineers live everywhere in the US. 

We value meeting in person, but there’s no pressure to come into the office every day. We believe you’ll do your best work when you’re where you want to be. That said, we do ask that you spend three days per week in the NY office to help us stay connected and collaborate effectively. If you live outside of New York and we ask you to come into the office, Monzo will support you with the costs.  ✨

Our offices are naturally social, especially Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Teams also schedule time together often for work and play – in or around the office, or online.

Set up a work schedule that delivers impact and fits your life.

At Monzo, we value connections, flexibility, and wellbeing. We keep our meetings during core hours to stay connected and believe in maintaining work/life balance. 

You’ll be empowered to manage your work in a way that suits you and your team, giving you the freedom for children drop-offs and pick-ups, walking your dog or adventurous cat, avoiding peak commuting times or gym slots, appointments, or supporting your family in an emergency. 🕒✨

Work the way that works for you with Monzo! 💼

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

We're on the look out for L60 Staff Backend Engineers at the moment, you can read more in our Engineering Progression Framework 

Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! Studies show that women and people of colour might hesitate to apply unless they meet every single requirement. At Monzo, we’re dedicated to creating a diverse and welcoming team. If you’re passionate about this role and keen to learn and grow with us, we encourage you to apply -  even if you don’t have everything that's listed just yet. Drop us your application, we’d love to hear from you!

What you’ll be working on: 

We hire very technically agnostic so whilst we use the below technologies we do not expect prior knowledge, you will be fully supported in our organised onboarding to get up to speed in the below: 

• 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 
• Envoy Proxy for RPC
• AWS for most of our production infrastructure and GCP for most of our data infrastructure
• React for our public web apps and internal tools
• We also have physical datacenters with actual cables to connect to various third parties

The Interview Process:

Our interview process involves three main stages: 

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

Our average process takes around 4 weeks but we will always work around your availability. 

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:

• 💰 $221,000 - $299,000 base salary➕ plus stock options
• 🏥 Great Health, Dental and Vision Insurance
• 📈 Stock Options
• 💰 Generous 401k with 4% employer match
• 🏥 Great Health, Dental and Vision Insurance
• ⏰ 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. Work the way that works for you with Monzo!
• 🏝 32 days of vacation and public holidays per year (and we require that you take all of your days each year as we believe that well rested employees are more effective!)
• 🏡 Maternity / Paternity leave