Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Financial Crime

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £140,000 - £190,000 + Share Options | Benefits | Technology 

Senior Staff Engineer: L80 on our Engineering Progression Framework

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 300 engineers out of roughly 3,000 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.

About Financial Crime: 

Our Financial Crime team includes over 75 technical staff (Backend Engineers, ML Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Web Engineers, Analytics Engineers, Data Scientists and Data Analysts).

Our vision for Financial Crime at Monzo is to enable products and services that solve for the financial needs of all customers AND inherently safeguard customers and society from the harm of financial crime. It has a major influence on the overall customer experience and has measurable outcomes for society, our customers and our business.

Our work to fight Financial Crime & Fraud is mission-critical to Make Money Work for Everyone:

• Earn and keep customer trust by building strong foundations to prevent and reduce financial crime 
• Grow Monzo safely by staying one step ahead of evolving financial crime risks that may inhibit our growth
• Build a safer society by protecting the integrity of the financial system and keeping communities safe

Senior Staff Engineer Responsibilities:

A Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Senior Staff Engineer in the Financial Crime collective at Monzo, you’ll:

• Partner with the Engineering Director supporting the collective and provide technical leadership across all squads.
• Work with the product leadership team of your collective to ensure we are making the right trade-offs across squads. 
• 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 your 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

As a Senior Staff Engineer in Financial Crime, you will have company-wide influence, working with other collectives to grow Monzo safely. You will sit at the intersection of building products as well as ML models and platforms. You will make sure that our systems are fit for purpose and accelerate. You will prepare the team to respond to adversarial attacks by criminals and occasionally lead efforts to nullify such attacks. This is the most senior IC position within Financial Crime.

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
• 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 internal Web dashboards
• Feast for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.

🤩We’d love to hear from you if… 

• You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products
• You have technically led large teams to solve complex product challenges and manage trade-offs.
• You have experience working on Backend Systems, Data-intensive systems or real-world ML deployments
• You have some experience in Financial Crime, Security, Fraud, Trust & Safety or Integrity
• You want to be involved in building and protecting a product that you (and the people you know) use every day
• You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you 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 think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing

🙌What’s in it for you

💰£140,000 - £190,000 ➕ 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.

🌈 The application journey has 4 key steps

Our interview process involves four main stages after an informal recruiter call: 

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 

This process should take around 2-3 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 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 staff engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.

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