Senior Backend Engineer – Lead Complex Systems (Remote UK)

SoftwareCareers; Cardiff, Greater London; Remote; GBP 155,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

Visa sponsorship

£1,000 learning budget each year

Work-from-home setup assistance

Macbooks provided

Job summary

Monzo is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide hands-on engineering leadership across multiple squads in the UK, including Cardiff, London or Remote. You’ll shape technical and product direction, lead architectural decisions, and mentor senior engineers while working with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable backend systems and features.

The role offers a base salary in the £155,000–£200,000 range plus equity, visa sponsorship, relocation help, and a flexible, distributed working

Qualifications

• You have a track record of leading complex, high-impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams.
• You combine strong technical judgment with product and business awareness, making pragmatic trade-offs.
• You’ve worked on scalable backend, distributed or data-intensive systems.
• You’re comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams define direction and execute.
• You influence and align senior stakeholders across engineering, product and beyond.
• You care about outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions.
• You enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for other engineers.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Engineering Directors to shape the technical and product direction of a collective, providing leadership across multiple squads (30–70+ engineers) and ensuring alignment with company-wide priorities.
• Be hands on in both coding and architecture, leading from the front.
• Mobilise teams across your collective around high-impact problems, creating clarity, alignment and momentum, injecting urgency when needed, or slowing things down to ensure safety and long-term sustainability.
• Lead and influence architectural direction for the most complex systems, ensuring cohesive, scalable designs across multiple teams and aligning local decisions with the broader system strategy.
• Set and uphold a high bar for technical excellence across the collective, driving improvements in quality, reliability and scalability, and fostering a culture where engineers hold each other to that standard.
• Proactively mentor, sponsor and develop senior engineers and future leaders, multiplying your impact by enabling others to operate at a higher level.

Skills

Technical leadership

System design

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Product awareness

Tools

Go

Cassandra

Kafka

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

GCP

React

Feast

Job description

Monzo is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide hands-on engineering leadership across multiple squads in the UK, including Cardiff, London or Remote. You’ll shape technical and product direction, lead architectural decisions, and mentor senior engineers while working with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable backend systems and features.

The role offers a base salary in the £155,000–£200,000 range plus equity, visa sponsorship, relocation help, and a flexible, distributed working