Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Monzo Bank; Greater London; On-site; GBP 135,000 - 184,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

£1,000 learning budget per year

Flexible working hours

Relocation support

Visa sponsorship

Home office setup support

Job summary

A technology-focused financial institution in Greater London seeks a Senior Staff Engineer to lead engineering teams and shape product direction. You will drive technical excellence in complex systems, mentor senior engineers, and collaborate closely with product and design teams. This role requires strong leadership, technical judgment, and experience with scalable backend systems. The position offers a competitive salary, share options, and the opportunity for flexible working arrangements.

Qualifications

• Experience leading complex, high-impact systems across multiple teams.
• Strong technical judgment combined with product and business awareness.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces and influencing stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction and provide leadership across multiple squads.
• Lead coding and architecture hands-on.
• Define strategy and shape roadmaps in collaboration with Product and Design.

Skills

Leadership

Technical Judgment

Mentoring

Communication

Tools

Go

Cassandra

Kafka

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

GCP

React

Feast

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 ❤️

📍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 600 engineers out of roughly 5,000 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’ll 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

• 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.
• Partner closely with Product and Design leadership to define strategy, shape roadmaps, and make high‑quality trade‑offs that maximise business and customer impact across the collective.
• 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.

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 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.

What’s In It For You

💰 £140,000 - £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

• Recruiter Call
• Initial Call
• System Design Interview
• Take home task or pair coding exercise
• 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 staff engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process. For extra details, hints and tips please see here.

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. We 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, 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 😊