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Backend Engineer L30

Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

At Monzo we’re aiming to build the best current account in the world. We are always keen to hear from capable, creative engineers who want to help us accomplish that goal 🚀

Our backend engineers have a variety of different backgrounds

We have several non-graduates; only some of us studied Computer Science; one of the team has a degree in Marketing; some of us have worked in huge companies; some have only ever worked in startups; others are former consultants. 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.

We are actively creating an equitable environment for all of our engineers to thrive

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. We provide a sponsorship framework in Engineering for women and people of colour; all of our leaders are trained on privilege awareness and we are creating partnerships with organisations dedicated to supporting underrepresented groups. You can read more in our 2020 Diversity and Inclusion report.

We encourage an open and transparent working environment

You can get involved in any aspect of the business you are interested in and, following Stripe’s example, all emails in the company are visible in an email archive. We contribute to open source software as much as possible. Our blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do!

Monzo works in project-based sprints in small, interdisciplinary teams

We have around 150 engineers out of roughly 1,400 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.

At Monzo you will get to work with a lot of exciting new technology.

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 (Oliver, our VP Architecture, gave a great talk at KubeCon on how we use these technologies)
  • 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

Our product squads are truly cross-functional.

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 product squads belong to one of four collectives (a word we use to describe self-governing business units of ~100 people). They are: Growth & Core, Borrowing, Operations and Money. They’re all looking for additional Backend Engineers right now.

The Growth & Core collective helps people to discover Monzo and make the most of it.

Growth & Core is a collective focused on different aspects of our mission to ‘make money work for everyone’ and it has four squads. They make users effortlessly financially savvy with features like Budgeting, Pots and the Salary Sorter. Many of the customer problems they solve are revenue opportunities, too – like Monzo Plus, Business Banking, and the Savings marketplace. Last year they also launched our Open Banking APIs, shipped a simpler and more future-proof navigation structure, and enabled Monzo customers to get their salary paid a day early for free! 🤑

The Borrowing collective makes borrowing money simple, fair and transparent.

We’re really proud that this fair approach to lending helps people to get what they want from life on their own terms. Squads in Borrowing have already shipped and scaled overdrafts to hundreds of thousands of Monzo customers. They’ve made it easy to take out a loan without the unfair fees or confusing pricing that you find elsewhere. They work on everything from the way borrowing works in the app, right down to how they move and account for money that our customers borrow. One of the most interesting problems they face is deciding how much to lend and to whom. The team believes that they can make access to credit fairer and more transparent.

The Operations collective is responsible for our incredible customer support.

The Operations collective looks after one of the most interesting problem spaces at Monzo: as we grow, we want to ensure that we’re using technology as effectively as possible whilst still maintaining customer service so good that you want to tell your friends. Our engineers within this area of the business help us to explore these challenges. Central to it all is Monzo Chat – a completely bespoke bit of software we’ve built from the ground up to manage chats in our app - but we’re also doing work with machine learning, and looking at how technology can more broadly support our wonderful support team (we call them COps) in other aspects.

The Money collective helps Monzo move fast and in control with our money 💰

We are the bank within the bank and are responsible for the core infrastructure and banking services you associate with Monzo. We are the Guardians of the Monzo Ledger and own everything related to our distinctive Hot Coral cards.

Engineering squads within the Money collective carry out a variety of payments and finance related work, we built our very own Mastercard processor from scratch and recently we successfully replaced a third-party Faster Payments Gateway with our own internal Gateway to reduce outages we can't control. On top of this we've been ensuring our payment schemes are compliant with key regulatory requirements such as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), 3D Secure V2 (3DSV2), making sure that our core infrastructure and services will scale to support our ambitious growth plans and that we always know where our money is and can report accurately and reliably on it.

The financial crime at Monzo team focuses on making sure our services are a hostile environment for criminals ⛔

We tackle all financial crime together as one team, this includes money laundering, fraud, sanctions breaches, terrorist financing, bribery and corruption and tax evasion. Engineers get to work on core services that are consumed by many different products which means we have a really broad perspective. We've had some major successes in combating financial crime, most famously The Ticketmaster Breach where we spotted large-scale fraudulent activity due to a Ticketmaster data breach before Ticketmaster or other banks did.

The TechOps team

The TechOps team are challenging the traditional IT model by building a brand new people platform to automate all aspects of a Monzo staff member’s time here. We’re building an industry leading people platform to support our staff in a delightful way and to accommodate rapid growth across multiple countries. This approach will allow us to empower our staff by providing smart, efficient and powerful tools instead of relying on traditional IT systems and a horde of IT staff.

You should apply if 

Our open roles are for mid-level to senior Backend Engineers at present.

    • you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
    • you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing
    • 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.).

Logistics

Salary is around £90,000 - £116,000 plus stock options and other benefits.

We can help you relocate to London & we can sponsor visas.

This role can be based in our London office, but we're open to distributed working (with ad hoc meetings in London once COVID is over).

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

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.

Diversity and inclusion is a priority for us – if we want to solve problems for people around the world, our team has to represent our customers. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them. You can read more about diversity and inclusion on our blog.

If you prefer to work part-time, we'll make this happen whenever we can - whether this is to help you meet other commitments or strike a great work-life balance.

Our interview process is normally a phone interview, a coding task and call to discuss it, and 2-3 hours of onsite interviews that can be conducted via hangouts as well. We promise not to ask you any brain teasers or trick questions. We might design a system together on a whiteboard, the same way we often work together, but we won’t make you write code on one.

Equal Opportunity Statement

At Monzo, embracing diversity in all of its forms and 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 ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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