Monzo
Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Growth
Job Summary
This role is for a Senior Staff Backend Engineer at Monzo, focusing on technical leadership across multiple teams in the Growth department. The candidate will partner with managers and stakeholders to drive impactful projects, contribute to system architecture, and mentor engineers. The role involves working with various technologies including cloud services, data storage, message queues, and infrastructure automation. The position emphasizes delivering resilient, high-quality systems that support the company's growth objectives and customer impact.
Required Skills
Benefits
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 | 💰 £140,000 - £175,000 + Share Options | Benefits | Technology
About Growth at Monzo:
In Growth, we’re responsible for driving one of the most important company level metrics: new user acquisition. We’re made up of small, autonomous, cross-functional squads and need to collaborate across disciplines to form and test hypotheses with the aim of unlocking value for customers as soon as possible. We focus on experimentation and using data to make decisions so that we can (in)validate these hypotheses as quickly as possible in order to identify impactful changes and double down on them.
You and your team will have the opportunity to have an impact on both what we build as well as how we build it.
We're looking for a growth minded Senior Staff backend engineer with strong product experience. You'll care about the impact your work has on our customers, and optimise for impact rather than the number of lines of code you output; progress over perfection.
As a Senior Staff Engineer:
A Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Senior Staff Engineer in the Growth collective at Monzo, you will:
- Partner with a Senior Engineering Manager supporting the collective and provide technical leadership across multiple squads and ~20 engineers.
- Work collaboratively with product, data and operational leaders to identify and execute on opportunities that further the organisation’s goals and strategy, bringing the right level of clarity, urgency and rigour as appropriate.
- Oscillate between contributing to high-level planning and strategy and organisational leadership and diving deep into the execution of problems and getting hands-on as necessary.
- Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for complex systems in the collective. You’ll do this in order to arrive at solutions that are robust and optimal given the context.
- 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.
- React for customer support tooling.
- Feast for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.
- GPT and Vertex models for Large Language Model support.
🤩 We’d love to hear from you if…
- You have a track record guiding teams and stakeholders to prioritise things that drive important metrics and you take the lead in using data to make decisions. Bonus if you’ve partnered closely with Marketing stakeholders to do this.
- You have a track record of balancing speed of execution with technical excellence, delivering resilient systems for consumer products.
- You solve problems end-to-end, from client applications to backend infrastructure.
- You have technically led across 3-4 teams to solve complex optimisation problems.
- 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.
🌈 The application journey has 4 key steps
Our interview process involves four main stages after an informal recruiter call:
- Recruiter Call
- Initial Call
- System Design Interview
- Take home task or pair coding exercise
- Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview
This process should take around 3-4 weeks - your schedule is really important to us, so we promise to be as flexible as possible!
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 [email protected]
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.
🙌What’s in it for you
💰£140,000 - £175,000 ➕ 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.
#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, 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 😊
Monzo
Organise, save & invest with a free UK current account, joint account or business account. Make your money more Monzo.
See more jobsSafe Remote Job Search Tips
Verify Employer Thoroughly
Research the company's identity thoroughly before applying. Check for a professional website with contacts, active social media, and LinkedIn profiles. Verify details across platforms and look for reviews on Glassdoor or Trustpilot to confirm legitimacy.
Never Pay to Get a Job
Legitimate employers never require payment for applications, training, background checks, or equipment. Always reject upfront payment requests or demands for bank details, even if they claim it's for purchasing necessary work gear on your behalf.
Safeguard Your Personal Information
Protect sensitive data like SSN, bank details, or ID copies. Share this only after accepting a formal, written job offer. Ensure it's submitted via a secure company system or portal, never through insecure channels like standard email attachments.
Scrutinize Communication & Interviews
Watch for communication red flags: poor grammar, generic emails (@gmail), vague details, or undue pressure. Be highly suspicious of interviews held only via text or chat apps; legitimate companies typically use video or phone calls.
Beware of Unrealistic Offers
If an offer's salary or benefits seem unrealistically high for the work involved, be cautious. Research standard pay for similar roles. Offers that appear 'too good to be true' are often scams designed to lure you into providing information or payment.
Insist on a Formal Contract
Always secure and review a formal, written job offer or employment contract before starting work or sharing final personal details. Ensure it clearly defines your role, compensation, key terms, and conditions to avoid misunderstandings or scams.