Monzo Bank Logo

Monzo Bank

Principal Backend Engineer

Posted 6 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
In-Office or Remote
2 Locations
Senior level
In-Office or Remote
2 Locations
Senior level
As a Principal Backend Engineer, you'll lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and manage complex systems, ensuring high quality and collaboration across teams.
The summary above was generated by AI

🚀 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 ❤️


📍London / UK Remote | 💰 This is a unique role, we're open to discussions on base salary +  incentive awards tied to your performance + share options + benefits | Technology 

Principal Engineer: L80 on our Engineering Progression Framework

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 600 engineers out of roughly 5,000 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.

Principal Engineer Responsibilities:

A Principal Engineer at Monzo is a hands on engineering leadership (IC) position. As a Principal Engineer you’ll:

  • Partner with and guide Engineering and Product Leaders to shape the technical and product direction of Monzo, providing company-shaping leadership across collectives (100+ engineers) and driving alignment with company-wide priorities, owning problems that materially impact Monzo’s trajectory over the next 1-5 years.
  • Remain hands-on in both coding and architecture where it adds the most leverage, especially in complex, high-risk or novel areas.
  • Actively identifying high-leverage opportunities for Monzo and setting the direction of Engineering effort towards the most impactful outcomes.
  • Mobilise teams across Monzo around high-impact problems, creating clarity, alignment and momentum, injecting urgency, or slowing things down to ensure safety and long-term sustainability.
  • Lead and influence architectural direction for the most complex systems, driving consistency and reuse across domains, aligning local decisions with the broader system strategy.
  • Set and uphold a high bar for technical excellence across Monzo, identifying and driving improvements in quality, reliability and scalability, and fostering a culture where engineers hold each other to that standard.
  • Proactively mentor, sponsor and develop senior engineers and future leaders, multiplying your impact by enabling others to operate at a higher level.

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 leading complex, high-impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams, domains or business areas
  • You think in multi-year horizons to look around corners and build for the future, identifying opportunities before they present themselves
  • You combine strong technical judgment with product and business awareness, making pragmatic trade-offs
  • You’ve worked on large scale backend, distributed or data-intensive systems
  • You’re comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams define direction and execute
  • You influence and align the most senior stakeholders across engineering, product and beyond
  • You care about outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions and to iterate
  • You enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for other engineers

🙌What’s in it for you

💰 This is a unique role, we're open to discussions on base salary +  incentive awards tied to your performance + share options + benefits

✈️ 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 5 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 4-6 weeks - your schedule is really important to us, so we promise to be as flexible as possible! 

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

#LI-Remote

#LI-ZM


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 😊

HQ

Monzo Bank London, England Office

Broadwalk House, Appold Street, London, United Kingdom, EC2A 2AG

Similar Jobs

14 Days Ago
In-Office or Remote
London, Greater London, England, GBR
Senior level
Senior level
Beauty • Fashion • Retail
Lead the architecture and development of backend services and APIs for e-commerce platforms, ensuring scalability and security while collaborating across teams.
Top Skills: AWSDockerGCPGraphQLKafkaNode.jsRestTerraformTypescript
7 Hours Ago
Remote
United Kingdom
Entry level
Entry level
Aerospace • Information Technology • Software • Cybersecurity • Design • Defense • Manufacturing
The Background Screening Specialist will conduct audits and background checks for new hires and existing employees, ensuring compliance with security standards and data protection policies.
Top Skills: Common It Programs
14 Hours Ago
In-Office or Remote
London, Greater London, England, GBR
Senior level
Senior level
Blockchain • Fintech • Payments • Financial Services • Cryptocurrency • Web3
The Senior Solutions Engineer II will lead technical solutions for Capital Markets, working with Business Development and clients to design and implement scalable solutions, provide market feedback, and support integrations.
Top Skills: APIsBlockchainDatabasesFintechSaaSWeb3

What you need to know about the London Tech Scene

London isn't just a hub for established businesses; it's also a nursery for innovation. Boasting one of the most recognized fintech ecosystems in Europe, attracting billions in investments each year, London's success has made it a go-to destination for startups looking to make their mark. Top U.K. companies like Hoptin, Moneybox and Marshmallow have already made the city their base — yet fintech is just the beginning. From healthtech to renewable energy to cybersecurity and beyond, the city's startups are breaking new ground across a range of industries.

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account