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Staff Backend Engineer, Search

Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

🚀 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 ❤️

Hear from our team about what it's like working at Monzo ✨

 

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £140,000 - £165,000 + Share Options | Benefits | Technology

About this role:

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:

  1. Launch a global search experience working end-to-end from customer experience in our mobile apps to backend systems, indexes, and data pipelines
  2. Scale search to support all Monzo’s account types (incl. Business Banking, US) and internationalisation
  3. 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 (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.
  • 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

💰£140,000 - £165,000 ➕ 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

Our interview process for this role has four main stages, most of which can be scheduled on the same day: 

  1. Initial Call 
  2. System Design Interview 
  3. Pair coding exercise 
  4. 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 us at any point on tech-hiring@monzo.com

We have some guidelines on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ace an application and interview at Monzo. You can read them here. Please also use that email to let us know if there's anything we can do to make your application process easier for you, because of disability, neurodiversity or any other personal reason.

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.

#LI-Remote

#LI-TT1

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, 2023 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2023 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 😊

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A US Person is defined as someone who:

  • was born in the United States (US)
  • has at least 1 parent who was born in the US
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Our goal at Monzo is to make money work for everyone. To do that, working at Monzo must work for everyone. We want to create an equitable, engaged and innovative workplace which gives people from all backgrounds the support they need to thrive and grow. 

Making Monzo work for everyone starts right at the beginning of every Monzonaut's journey: when they apply to work here. This demographic survey will help us better understand the people who apply to work at Monzo. It'll help us see how different groups progress through our hiring process, and where we need to make improvements to be more inclusive. If you choose to fill it out, all of the information you give us is:

  • Voluntary. And we've included a "prefer not to say" option for every question. It'd be helpful if you still fill out the survey even if you choose "prefer not to say" for every question, as it's useful for us to understand & record this. We won't know if you choose to fill this survey in or not.
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For more information on how we'll use this data, please read our candidate privacy notice.

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