Lead Engineer - Personal Savings

Department: Engineering

Location: London

Employment Type: FullTime

ABOUT US
At OakNorth, we're on a mission to empower ambitious businesses and the communities they serve. Since 2015, we've lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while driving economic growth in the markets we serve.

About the team

Personal Savings and Wealth exists to make saving simple, personal and rewarding, helping families build financial confidence from everyday savings to long-term plans.

We own the full product lifecycle, from spotting customer needs and shaping propositions through to design, build, launch and growth. That means the end-to-end experience across mobile and web, the secure, resilient systems behind it (money movement, identity and customer servicing), and working closely with marketing, operations and commercial teams to take products to market and measure what lands. We’re constantly improving our core savings products while bringing new ones to life, combining thoughtful design, strong engineering and a sharp commercial focus.

The role

• Lead multiple AI-native pods while staying hands-on: coding, reviewing and pairing.

• Manage stakeholders at every level, from product and commercial to risk and senior leadership, setting expectations and negotiating trade-offs.

• Turn customer and business needs into products that land, bringing stakeholders with you from idea to launch.

• Own technical delivery and measure success by business impact, not lines of code.

• Design simple, resilient, scalable event-driven systems: you build it, you run it.

• Break complex problems into incremental, shippable steps with clear domain boundaries.

• Shape platform-wide architecture with an eye on wider business impact.

• Coach and mentor engineers by example.

• Use GenAI to move faster and decide better and help set the direction for how it’s embedded across the organisation.

Technology

We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use now:

• Python, NodeJS

• TypeScript, React, styled components

• PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL

• Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest

• AWS, GCP

• Docker, Terraform, GitHub, CircleCI

How we expect you to work

We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:

• Collaborate - We work in cross-functional, mission driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.

• Focus on outcomes over outputs - Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.

• Practice continuous improvement - We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame-free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.

• Seek to understand our users - We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users' needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.

• Embrace and enable continuous deployment - Seamless delivery of changes into an environment - without manual intervention - is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.

• Test outside-in, test first - TDD keeps us confident in moving fast and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset - writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.

• You build it, you run it - We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, can lead delivery of features from start to finish.

• Be cloud native - We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently.

How we expect you to behave

We embrace difference and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:

• A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all

• Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together

• Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question

• No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely

Benefits & Perks

• 25 days holiday

• Personalised benefits — opt-in to what matters to you

• Subsidised Private Medical Insurance with Bupa

• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave

• Wellbeing and social events

• In-house Barista Bar — London office

• Volunteering time off — support causes that matter to you

• Salary sacrifice schemes — cycle to work, nursery, gym, electric car scheme