Lead Engineer - Personal Savings - Payments

OakNorth; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A UK-based financial service is seeking a Lead Engineer to drive technical delivery and mentor a squad. The ideal candidate will lead efforts to design scalable solutions while embracing a DevOps culture. This hybrid role allows for flexible working arrangements and offers competitive salary and enhanced family leave. Opportunities for continuous learning and team engagement are emphasized.

Benefits

25 days holiday plus bank holidays

Competitive salary & equity

Good kit (your choice of laptop)

Commuter support

Team and company socials

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering squads.
• Strong background in event-driven and distributed systems.
• Ability to coach and mentor engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead a squad of 4-6 Engineers.
• Design resilient, scalable solutions.
• Collaborate with stakeholders for high-quality outcomes.

Skills

Leadership

Collaboration

Problem-solving

DevOps culture

Cloud-native practices

Tools

Python

NodeJS

TypeScript

React

PostgreSQL

AWS

Docker

Job description

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.

In Personal Savings, our mission is to deliver simple, personalised, and innovative savings solutions that deepen trust, reward loyalty, and enable long-term prosperity for families.

Team Mission

• The Payments squad in Personal Savings own the full payments journey, from transaction initiation in the mobile and web frontends to the processing in the backend, including Fraud and AML checks and connecting to the payments schemes, ensuring that businesses can focus on growth while we handle the complexity behind the scenes. Our goal is to deliver a fast, reliable, and seamless payment experience that empowers our customers to move money effortlessly and securely.

The role

• Lead a squad of 4-6 Engineers.
• Responsible for technical delivery and ensuring the squad understands and focuses on the goal.
• Design resilient, scalable solutions for event-driven and distributed systems.
• Break down complex problems into incremental deliverables with clear architecture and domain boundaries.
• Measure your success in terms of business impact, not lines of code.
• Embrace DevOps culture: You build it, you run it.
• Prefer simple solutions and designs over complex ones.
• Influence architecture across the broader platform, making pragmatic, forward-thinking decisions.
• Coach and mentor engineers, guiding both their technical and professional development.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business needs into high-quality technical outcomes.
• You are a broad thinker with the capability to see the impact of decisions across the wider business.
• Utilise GenerativeAI: Leverage GenAI tools to increase productivity and enhance decision making processes within the role.

Technology

• We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use now:
• Python, NodeJS
• TypeScript, React, styled-components
• PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
• Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
• AWS, GCP
• Docker, Terraform, GitHub, CircleCI

How we expect you to work ♀️

• We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:
• Collaborate - We work in cross-functional, mission driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs - Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.
• Practice continuous improvement - We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame‑free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.
• Seek to understand our users - We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users' needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment - Seamless delivery of changes into an environment - without manual intervention - is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.
• Test outside‑in, test first - TDD keeps us confident in moving fast and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset - writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.
• You build it, you run it - We embrace DevOps culture and end‑to‑end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, can lead delivery of features from start to finish.
• Be cloud native - We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently.

How we expect you to behave ❤️

• We embrace difference and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:
• A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all.
• Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together.
• Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question.
• No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely.

What makes working here better

• This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in‑person for white‑boarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
• Work‑life balance - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary & equity - We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
• Good kit - Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials - The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
• Company socials - A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts, lunch, and dinners on OakNorth - or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support - We offer the cycle to work and EV scheme.