Senior Staff Engineer

Monzo is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership across engineering teams, partnering with directors and product leadership to make strategic trade-offs and ensure technical excellence. This role involves leading architectural discussions for complex systems, fostering a culture of quality, and mentoring engineers. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in delivering resilient systems, experience in backend, data-intensive, or ML deployments, and a quantitative, data-informed approach to problem-solving. The position offers company-wide influence in building and accelerating Monzo's products and platforms.

Must Have

• Partner with the Engineering Director and provide technical leadership across all squads.
• Work with product leadership to ensure right trade-offs across squads.
• Rally your team around a mission, objective or company priority.
• Understand several work-streams and provide technical advice to other engineers.
• Lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems.
• Keep a high bar for technical excellence in the collective.
• Foster a culture of quality within your collective.
• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers.
• Track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems.
• Technically led large teams to solve complex product challenges.
• Experience working on Backend Systems, Data-intensive systems or real-world ML deployments.
• Want to be involved in building and protecting a product.
• Quantitative mindset: care about outcomes and make data-informed decisions.
• Comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity and helping resolve it.

Perks & Benefits

• £135,000 - £184,000 salary
• Share options
• Relocation assistance to the UK
• Visa sponsorship
• Flexible working hours
• £1,000 learning budget each year
• Macbooks provided
• Extra support for work-from-home setup for fully remote workers

🚀 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 ❤️

Hear from our UK team about what it's like working at Monzo ✨

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📍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 4,000 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.

Senior Staff Engineer Responsibilities:

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

• Partner with the Engineering Director supporting the collective and provide technical leadership across all squads.
• Work with the product leadership team of your collective to ensure we are making the right trade-offs across squads.
• 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 your collective. Proactively championing measures to test work, and gets buy-in from stakeholders when this is not appreciated.
• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers

As a Senior Staff Engineer you will have company-wide influence, working with other business units (collectives) to grow Monzo. You will sit at the intersection of building products as well as ML models and platforms. You will make sure that our systems are fit for purpose and accelerate.

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.

✈️ 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:

1. Recruiter Call

2. Initial Call

3. System Design Interview

4. Take home task or pair coding exercise

5. 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

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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 😊