Staff Engineer, Data Platform

Staff Engineer - Data Platform 

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £130,000 - £180,000 + Benefits | Technology - Engineering 

About us: 

At Monzo we’re aiming to build the control centre for peoples financial lives. We are always keen to hear from capable, creative engineers who want to help us accomplish that goal 🚀

We’re here to make money work for everyone and we're doing things differently. For too long, banking has been obtuse, complex and opaque.

We want to change that and build a bank with everyone, for everyone. Our amazing community suggests features, test the app and give us constant feedback so we can build something everyone loves.

We're focused on solving problems, rather than selling financial products. We want to make the world a better place and change people's lives through Monzo.

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 300 engineers out of roughly 2,000 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 contribute to open source software as much as possible. Our blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do.

What you’ll be using/What you’ll be working on: 

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 
• 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

Staff Engineer Responsibilities

A staff engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Staff Engineer in the Data Platform collective at Monzo, you’ll:

• Work with the product leadership team of your collective to ensure we are making the right trade-offs across squads. You’ll use your keen sense of product market fit to do this.
• Help your teams manage the trade-offs implied in shipping new product to market - balancing speed, polish and the need to learn what fits customers’ needs best
• Rally your team around a mission, objective or company priority, injecting urgency when needed or slowing down pace to make sure the right controls are in place
• Understand several work-streams across your group keeping enough context to regularly provide technical advice to other engineers
• Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most 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
• Foster a culture of quality within their collective. Proactively championing measures to test work, and gets buy-in from stakeholders when this is not appreciated. 
• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers

About Data Platform

Our Data team's mission is to Enable Monzo to Make Better Decisions, Faster and at the core of this mission sits our data platform. We have a strong culture of data-driven decision making across the whole company. And we're great believers in powerful, real-time analytics and empowerment of the wider business.

This team owns the data platform infrastructure, data tooling, Airflow instrumentation, Data Access and Data retention tooling across Monzo. They provide the data platform that delivers the data used by all of our data scientists, machine learning engineers and data analysts. They’re currently working on:

• Infrastructure and pipeline reliability and scalability
• Improving our change management tooling across the data discipline
• Building on our data privacy and data retention foundations
• Designing and validating compute primitives to support better and more flexible incremental processing
• Platform optimisation for better cost efficiency and scalability

Data is one of Monzo’s top priorities so there are lots of opportunities to have a huge impact on how we use Data at the company. You’ll have the opportunity to partner with other EMs and engineers across the Data discipline and beyond to shape and deliver our data strategy, and explore seeding new teams where there’s the opportunity.

As a Staff Engineer in Data Platform, you will sit at the intersection of our Engineering and Data disciplines. You'll provide a crucial bridging role in applying engineering best practices to the Data domain. You’ll make sure backend services are fit for purpose for various data usages downstream (like KPI reporting, finance and credit risk pipelines, and Machine Learning applications). It’s a unique opportunity to have an outsized impact.

You should apply if: 

• Have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products
• You have technically led teams to solve complex product challenges, enabling them to manage trade-offs in order to deliver products that solve customer needs at scale
• you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
• 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 and have experience helping your team and partner team resolve that ambiguity 
• you’re interested in distributed systems and writing resilient software
• you have some experience with strongly-typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.).
• you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing

The Interview Process:

Our interview process involves three main stages: 

1. Recruiter Call 
2. Initial Call 
3. System Design Interview 
4. Take home task or pair coding exercise 
5. Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview 

Our average process takes around 2-3 weeks but we will always work around your availability. 

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 

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 engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.

Logistics

💰Salary is around £130,000 - £180,000 plus stock options and other benefits.

✈️We can help you relocate to the UK 

✅We can sponsor visas.

📍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, at times that suit you and your team.

📚Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses and conferences

➕And much more, see our full list of benefits here 

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.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are actively creating an equitable environment for every Monzonaut 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. 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. You can read more in our blog, 2022 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 ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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