Staff Backend Engineer, Search Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

Monzo; London (KY); Remote; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company on a mission to revolutionize banking! As a Staff Engineer, you'll play a crucial role in enhancing the search experience for millions of customers. This innovative firm values technical excellence and collaboration, allowing you to work closely with diverse teams to tackle complex challenges. You'll have the opportunity to lead architectural discussions, mentor fellow engineers, and contribute to the strategic direction of search products. With flexible working hours, a generous learning budget, and support for remote work, this role offers a perfect blend of professional growth and work-life balance. If you're passionate about making a real impact in the tech space, this is the place for you!

Benefits

Flexible Working Hours

£1,000 Learning Budget

Macbook Provided

Support for Remote Work Setup

Visa Sponsorship

Qualifications

• Proven track record in technical leadership and delivering resilient systems.
• Experience collaborating with Machine Learning specialists on search ranking.

Responsibilities

• Lead the launch of a global search experience for Monzo's customers.
• Optimize search results using machine learning models and data feedback.

Skills

Technical Leadership

Machine Learning

Search Infrastructure

Cross-Functional Team Collaboration

Data-Informed Decision Making

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Experience in Engineering Leadership

Tools

Go

AWS

GCP

OpenSearch

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.

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.

We’re looking for somebody with deep experience building, scaling, and tuning complex search products. We’re rethinking the search experience in Monzo to enable 10 million customers to find what they’re looking for – transactions, products, help articles, people, and more – in as few keystrokes as possible.

This role sits in our Core Banking product collective, collaborating closely with ML Platform and a range of product teams across the business with a stake in how search results are ranked and displayed. You’ll be a key influence in the long-term product strategy for search at Monzo.

Initially, you’ll own 3 key challenges:

• Launch a global search experience working end-to-end from customer experience in our mobile apps to backend systems, indexes, and data pipelines.
• Scale search to support all Monzo’s account types (incl. Business Banking, US) and internationalisation.
• Optimise results with machine learning models and build feedback loops to measure search performance (e.g. latency and relevance).

As a Staff Engineer:

A Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Staff Engineer in the Core Banking collective, you will:

• Partner with engineering leadership in the collective and provide technical leadership on the search domain across Monzo’s broader engineering organisation.
• Work collaboratively with leaders in product, data, research, and design to identify and execute on opportunities that further the organisation’s goals and strategy.
• Oscillate between contributing to high-level planning and strategy and organisational leadership and diving deep into the execution of problems and getting hands-on.
• Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems in the collective.
• Keep a high bar for technical excellence in the collective, through your own work, highlighting the work of others and calling out when things haven’t quite met the bar.
• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers.

What you’ll be using:

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.
• AWS for most of our production infrastructure and GCP for most of our data infrastructure.
• OpenSearch for our first iteration of search infrastructure.

We’d love to hear from you if…

• You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products.
• You have real-world experience working with Machine Learning specialists on search ranking problems.
• You solve problems end-to-end, from client applications to backend infrastructure.
• You have led technically across 3-4 teams to deliver customer-facing features that leverage ML.
• You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you make data-informed decisions.
• You’re comfortable working in a cross-functional team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and partner teams resolve that ambiguity.
• You have demonstrable experience working with stakeholders, especially non-technical stakeholders at the senior level.

What’s in it for you:

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.

The application journey has 4 key steps:

• Initial Call
• System Design Interview
• Pair coding exercise
• Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview

You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions or want to talk through reasonable adjustments ahead of or during application please contact us at any point on [e-mail].

We have some guidelines on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ace an application and interview at Monzo.

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’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.

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