Staff Backend Engineer

Monzo; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 115,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company in the UK is seeking a Staff Engineer to build and support their product. This role involves collaborating with diverse teams and working with technologies like Go, Kafka, and AWS. The ideal candidate has strong backend development experience with a product mindset. Offering a competitive salary between £115,000 and £150,000, this position can be based in the London office or remotely across the UK, complete with flexible working hours and numerous benefits.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Learning budget of £1,000

Stock options

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Qualifications

• Strong experience working on the backend of a technology product.
• Experience with strongly-typed languages such as Go, Java, or C.
• Interest in building resilient software.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate across disciplines to test hypotheses.
• Build and support parts of Monzo's product.
• Work alongside product managers, designers, and engineers.

Skills

Backend development experience

Experience with strongly-typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala)

Teamwork in ambiguous environments

Interest in distributed systems

Tools

Go

Cassandra

Kafka

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

React

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 | Staff Engineer (L60) £115,000 - £150,000 + Benefits | Technology – Engineering

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 300 engineers out of roughly 2,500 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!

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
• Envoy Proxy for RPC
• Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services
• AWS for most of our infrastructure
• React for internal web dashboards
• We also have two physical datacenter sites with actual cables to connect to various third parties

Your day‑to‑day

This role is all about collaborating across disciplines to test hypotheses and make a difference to customers. As a product backend engineer you’ll work in a squad alongside product managers, marketers, user researchers, designers, mobile engineers, web engineers, data analysts, business analysts, writers and more!

Together you’ll build and support a particular part of Monzo. Our squads belong to our wider collectives – Core Banking, Business Banking, Wealth, Borrowing, Growth, Payments, Platform, Fincrime, Security & Expansion. All of our collectives are doing innovative work, many of which have machine learning and AI at the forefront – from fighting financial crime to building smarter financial tools – and you may have the opportunity to join a collective that gives you direct exposure to this exciting space.

Our backend engineers have a variety of different backgrounds. As long as you enjoy learning new things, we’d love to talk to you. We do not ask for formal qualifications or degree requirements for any of our engineering roles.

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.

Set up a work schedule that delivers impact and fits your life

At Monzo, we value connections, flexibility, and wellbeing. We keep our meetings during core hours to stay connected and believe in maintaining work/life balance.

You’ll be empowered to manage your work in a way that suits you and your team, giving you the freedom for children drop‑offs and pick‑ups, walking your dog or adventurous cat, avoiding peak commuting times or gym slots, appointments, or supporting your family in an emergency. ✨

Work the way that works for you with Monzo!

You should apply if:

• You have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
• You want to be involved in building a product that you (and the people you know) use every day
• You have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data‑informed decisions
• You’re comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity
• You’re interested in distributed systems and writing resilient software
• You have some experience with strongly‑typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.)
• You think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing

We’re on the look out for L60 Engineers at the moment; you can read more in our Engineering Progression Framework. We are also hiring on L40 & L50, and our interview process will determine your levelling.

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 2‑3 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

£115,000 - £150,000 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 or remotely across 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 here

We're usually always hiring for Backend Engineers, so there's no closing date for this job.

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.