Staff Engineer

About Chetwood Bank:

We’ve been challenging the way financial services firms should operate ever since our launch back in 2016. From day one, we’ve been focused on helping customers underserved by the mainstream banks, creating highly targeted products to meet their specific needs. Today, we focus on mortgage and savings products. We understand real people and their real lives, and our simple, clear approach is designed to help customers make sense of their money. We work hard to make sure customers get the quick and helpful support they need in the moments that matter, when they matter. We’re a secure, stable, and well-funded bank backed by a large investor. We generate funding using retail deposits through our savings brand, SmartSave.

We’re looking for an exceptional software engineer with extensive data experience to join the Data Platform team at Chetwood as Staff Engineer (Tech Lead). As part of the engineering leadership you will contribute to the technology vision for Chetwood and help to set the bar for all of the engineering work our data engineering team does. You will provide technical leadership for data engineering, helping the team to understand & align their work to achieving the business goals and working with them to ensure we design and build robust, reliable, maintainable and secure systems.

You and your team will develop and maintain Chetwood’s shared Data Platform infrastructure in AWS, handling enterprise-scale data from numerous sources. The Chetwood Data Platform operates as a hub for our data, providing tooling to make onboarding and leveraging our data quick, easy and safe for data producers and data consumers. As a financial institution, of course, all our data systems require a high degree of rigour.

The AWS technologies you will work with on a daily basis include Lambda, S3, LakeFormation, Glue, Step Functions, Athena, EventBridge, SNS, SQS and DynamoDB. In addition, awareness of QuickSight, RDS, and Redshift may be useful as we’re still actively migrating data from legacy systems. To ensure reliable and rapid releases you would benefit from good knowledge of CI and CD tooling. We predominantly use GitHub actions for CI/CD workflows and Terraform for IaC.

Where appropriate we’ll also take advantage of OpenSource and / or third party software solutions to accelerate our time to value and reduce our total cost of ownership. As such we’re also interested in your wider experience of open source and commercial data tooling. While this is predominantly a technology role you’ll certainly contribute to the Data Platform’s product roadmap, working with business stakeholders to leverage the art of the possible. You will be passionate about building great data systems, finding better ways to build, and spreading that knowledge and passion to other engineers both within and beyond your own team. You’ll be driven by enabling others to leverage our data in their daily roles.

Key Responsibilities:

• Using your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions with your teams, and contribute to the overall System Architecture
• Guide the team of data engineers to improve the maturity of the data estate with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, quality testing etc.
• Participate in code and design reviews, and provide recommendations to other team members
• Design and implement enterprise-level data platform tooling
• Mentor and lead other engineers to build and maintain scalable, performant and reliable systems that are easily testable and maintainable.
• Maintain and improve data governance within the cloud estate
• Collaborate with and lead cross-functional teams to design and implement new features and functionality
• Architect and document data systems, sharing designs via our Technology Design Authority for review and approval
• Help your team manage the trade-offs when shipping new products and features to market – balancing business priorities, and customer needs

Essential Skills & Experience:

• Hands on experience of modern data platform architectures
• Excellent experience working with AWS, including Lambda, S3, LakeFormation, Glue, Step Functions, Athena, EventBridge, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB and the IAM policies that support them all
• Highly proficient in developing with Python
• Good experience of building CI/CD pipelines, especially via GitHub actions
• Experience working with Infrastructure as Code, ideally with Terraform
• Understanding of how to architect resilient, highly available and efficient data pipelines
• Experience with serverless architecture, design patterns, and best practices
• Good communication skills - you are able to communicate with engineering teams and other stakeholders so that they understand and buy in to your proposals
• Problem solving - you enjoy the challenge of solving complex engineering problems and designing & implementing large scale systems (and the challenges this can entail)
• Automation & efficiency - you look for ways to increase productivity and flow by removing manual work from both engineering teams and the solutions that the teams build.
• Quality mindset - you care about building high quality systems and have experience of building a quality culture in teams
• Care - you understand that people are the heart of our engineering team and enjoy coaching / mentoring others to help them grow and develop their skills and progress their careers

Desirable Skills & Experience:

• Enterprise use of Amazon Redshift
• Skilled in SQL
• Experience working with DynamoDB, including DynamoDB Streams
• Awareness of data privacy and other relevant banking regulatory requirements

Chetwood Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• 25 days holiday PLUS your BIRTHDAY off
• Pension contribution with Royal London
• Life Assurance
• Private medical, dental and optical health insurance with Axa
• Hybrid working – Wrexham or Central London
• Free breakfast available