Senior Platform Engineer

Monzo; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company seeks a Senior Engineer to enhance its platform and infrastructure, utilizing tools like Kubernetes and AWS. This role offers a base salary of £95,000 - £130,000 plus stock options, with opportunities for flexible working across the UK. Candidates should have strong software engineering skills and experience with cloud platforms and automation. This position is vital for supporting the company's goal to grow its customer base and improve financial services.

Benefits

Base salary of £95,000 - £130,000

Stock options

Learning budget of £1,000 a year

Flexible working hours

Qualifications

• Significant professional experience in software engineering and backend services.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).

Responsibilities

• Enhance and maintain platform foundational tools and systems.
• Build and maintain backend services that simplify backend experience.
• Work with Kubernetes clusters and AWS/GCP infrastructure.

Skills

Software engineering

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Cloud & Container Experience

Tools

Go

Envoy Proxy

Job description

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 ✨

London / UK Remote | Senior Engineer £95,000 - £130,000 + stock options + Benefits | Technology - Engineering |

About Platform Engineering at Monzo

The Platform Collective builds and maintains the infrastructure, tools and processes that sets the rest of Monzo technology teams up for success. We work on a wide range of shared infrastructure, services and engineer tooling.

The Infrastructure Platform team sit within the Platform Collective and are responsible for running the Kubernetes clusters, service mesh and networking that all of Monzo's microservices run on. Our team is made up of backend engineers and cloud infrastructure experts, using our experience and software engineering skills to solve problems and manage our cloud infrastructure.

Our Infrastructure Platform team Has Two Focus Areas

• Platform & Infrastructure Engineering: Enhancing and maintaining our foundational tools and systems.
  • Working hands‑on with our Kubernetes clusters, AWS infrastructure, and configuration management using Terraform.
  • Integrating and managing various open‑source components to provide robust, scalable primitives for our engineering teams.
• Software & Backend Engineering: Building and maintaining the services that abstract and orchestrate our infrastructure.
  • Designing and implementing backend services (APIs, controllers, etc.) that provide a simplified, self‑service experience for other engineers.
  • Developing software for complex projects like infrastructure migrations, high‑scale traffic management, or security tooling.

We’re investing heavily in this team to support Monzo’s ambitions to grow from 10 to 20 million customers, expand the range of products to improve our customers’ financial lives and set up the foundations for scaling Monzo across the globe.

How we work

Locations & Flexible Working

Our main tech hub is in London, but our engineers live everywhere in the UK— from Brighton to the Western Isles.

We value meeting in person but there’s no pressure to come into the office, even if you’re nearby. We believe you'll do your best work if you are where you want to be. If you live outside of London 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, which happen to line up with our twice‑weekly Monzo lunches & treat Thursdays ️. Teams also schedule time together often for work and play – in or around the office, or online.

What you’ll be working with

As a Platform Engineer at Monzo, you will work across the full breadth of our core infrastructure and application platform. This role involves a balanced split of responsibilities between two critical areas:

• Platform & Infrastructure Engineering: Enhancing and maintaining foundational tools and systems.
  • Working hands‑on with our Kubernetes clusters, AWS infrastructure, and configuration management using Terraform.
  • Integrating and managing various open‑source components to provide robust, scalable primitives for our engineering teams.
• Software & Backend Engineering: Building and maintaining the services that abstract and orchestrate our infrastructure.
  • Designing and implementing backend services that provide a simplified, self‑service experience for other engineers.
  • Developing software for complex projects like infrastructure migrations, high‑scale traffic management, or security tooling.

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies, please note direct experience in these technologies is not required and our interview process can be completed in any language:

• Go to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial here), in platform we build services to manage parts of the platform
• Kubernetes – most workloads we run are on Kubernetes with this team being responsible for the underlying cluster’s management
• AWS and GCP – whilst our primary platform is in AWS our footprint in GCP is continually growing and we are increasing our maturity across both of these platforms
• Terraform – is primarily how we manage any resources deployed into the cloud
• Envoy Proxy – for our RPC service mesh

We’d love to hear from you if…

To succeed in this role, you will need a strong background in both modern platform tooling and practical software development.

• Software Engineering Foundation: You have significant professional experience in software engineering, demonstrated by writing, testing, and deploying robust backend services using strongly typed languages.
• Cloud & Container Experience: You have hands‑on experience working with AWS and/or GCP, and you are proficient with Kubernetes.
• Automation & Infrastructure as Code: You are naturally inclined to solve problems through automation and have experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).
• System Curiosity: You are deeply curious about systems, enjoy diving deep to investigate complex issues, and understand how modern distributed applications fail and scale.
• Platform Mindset: You’d be excited to build a platform that enables success for everyone at Monzo, focusing on reliability, performance, and developer experience.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: You're comfortable working in a fast‑paced team that deals with ambiguity and evolving requirements.

We're on the look out for L40 & L50 Platform Engineers at the moment, you can read more in our Engineering Progression Framework

The Interview Process

Our interview process involves three main stages:

• Initial Call
• Take home task or pair coding exercise
• 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

• £95,000 - £130,000 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

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