Backend Engineer - Platform

Job content

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 ????

We’re currently looking for Backend Engineers to join our Platform team.

We’re looking for engineers with experience working with Platforms who are software engineers at heart - you’re as comfortable writing software to solve problems as you are operating AWS or Kubernetes. If you’re a software engineer who has some good cloud infrastructure experience already, or you’re eager to get really familiar with systems, tooling and libraries, this could be the role for you.

As a team, we’re responsible for designing, building, and operating the services we consume from AWS, along with the software we run on top like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Prometheus, and Kafka. We’re also responsible for operating our three physical data centres, our network, and being on-call for the things we own and run.

To achieve this, we’re organised into three squads within the Platform Group; Infrastructure Platform, Storage Platform, and Backend Platform. Each squad is responsible for solving a specific set of problems for our customers and our engineers. We’re looking for engineers who are interested in joining our Infrastructure Platform or Backend Platform squads right now, but there are opportunities to move between them as you gain experience with our platform.

We’ve posted a good overview of our platform on our blog if you’d like to learn more.

We’re investing a lot of up-front effort in building a scalable, secure, and extensible architecture for our millions of customers. Come and help us build a state-of-the-art microservices platform and build the kind of bank you want to use.

Our engineers have a variety of different backgrounds

We have several non-graduates; only some of us studied Computer Science; 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.

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.

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. We’ve also made our product roadmap public and give sneak peeks of features in our community forum . Our technology blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do!

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 (we also use Go to write software to control and manage our platform)
• AWS for most of our infrastructure
• Kubernetes to schedule and run our services (Chris, our Technical Director of Platform and Reliability and Suhail, a Staff Engineer in our Platform Collective gave a great talk recently at re:Invent sharing an overview of our platform )
• Prometheus to monitor everything! (see How we Monitor Monzo )
• Envoy Proxy for our Service Mesh
• Kafka for our asynchronous message queue
• Cassandra for most persistent data storage
• We also have three physical data centre sites with a number of leased lines to connect our cloud infrastructure to various payment systems

You Should Apply If

Our open roles are for mid-level to senior candidates at present. Apply if:

• the work we’re doing sounds exciting!
• you’re a software engineer at heart and you’re comfortable writing software to solve problems
• you’re interested in distributed systems and writing resilient, scalable software
• you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
• you’re familiar with some of our Platform technologies, or specialise in just one part
• you want to help build, scale and operate a platform to support a product that you (and everyone you know) use every day
• you’re keen to learn more about new technologies and the arcane inner workings of the financial industry
• you’re comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity

Logistics

Salary ranges between £59,000 - £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 (as long as you can spend around 20% of your time in London when our offices are open again).

We have payroll set up in four countries: the UK, Ireland, France, and Spain. Right now, we can only hire people who work from those countries and we’ll keep this updated with new ones as we expand and are able to hire from more places ????

We’re usually always hiring for 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.