Staff Backend Engineer, Monzo
Search
£140-165k
Plus share options
More information about location
Digital-only bank platform and marketplace
Be an early applicant
Digital-only bank platform and marketplace
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
£140-165k
Plus share options
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build a new kind of bank that makes money work for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products
- You have real-world experience working with Machine Learning specialists on search ranking problems
- You solve problems end-to-end, from client applications to backend infrastructure
- You have led technically across 3-4 teams to deliver customer-facing features that leverage ML
- You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you make data-informed decisions
- You’re comfortable working in a cross-functional team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and partner teams resolve that ambiguity
- You have demonstrable experience working with stakeholders, especially non-technical stakeholders at the senior level
What the job involves
- This role sits in our Core Banking product collective, collaborating closely with ML Platform and a range of product teams across the business with a stake in how search results are ranked and displayed
- You’ll be a key influence in the long-term product strategy for search at Monzo
- Launch a global search experience working end-to-end from customer experience in our mobile apps to backend systems, indexes, and data pipelines
- Scale search to support all Monzo’s account types (incl. Business Banking, US) and internationalisation
- Optimise results with machine learning models and build feedback loops to measure search performance (e.g. latency and relevance)
- A Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position
- Partner with engineering leadership in the collective and provide technical leadership on the search domain across Monzo’s broader engineering organisation
- Work collaboratively with leaders in product, data, research, and design to identify and execute on opportunities that further the organisation’s goals and strategy
- Oscillate between contributing to high-level planning and strategy and organisational leadership and diving deep into the execution of problems and getting hands-on
- Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems in the collective
- 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
- Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers
- 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
- OpenSearch for our first iteration of search infrastructure
Application process
- Initial Call
- System Design Interview
- Pair coding exercise
- Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview
- Our interview process can be completed in any language (programming)
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Monzo is a challenger bank that fully operates online and offers a full range of current, savings, business accounts, and more. The speed of the challenger banks to provide a great experience has been impressive, and the number of competitors appearing has proven the consumer desire for innovation.
Monzo remains one of the popular online banks, with more than 6 million customer active users. The company faces competition as more traditional banks, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, have launched their own digital banks. However, the new technologies that the company is built on enable it to expand quickly (with fewer issues) than the incumbent players' offerings.
With an increasing amount of people switching banks, the company's ever-expanding suite of banking and financial services (such as its buy-now-pay-later offering) has resulted in Monzo receiving the second-highest net switching gains among digital challenger banks (just behind Starling).
After setting U.S. expansion plans aside in 2020, the company launched in the U.S. market in early 2022, partnering with Sutton Bank to provide its U.S. accounts. After several years focused on narrowing its losses, Monzo hit profitability in the first two months of 2023. In the same year, 2 million new customers joined, tallying its customer base at 9 million in 2024.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Many candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
42% female employees
19% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 18 rounds)
May 2024
$190m
LATE VC
Mar 2024
$429.6m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.9bn
Company benefits
- Yearly Salary Review + Proactive pay increases to reflect growing responsibilities + Share options
- Flexible working hours
- Work From Home Opportunities + we'll pay for any equipment you need to do your job
- 24 days holiday a year, plus bank holidays
- Paid sick leave for both physical & mental health + Health insurance via AXA or Vitality + Additional health insurance through Medicash
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Learning budget of £1,000 a year
- Aviva Pension Scheme + 4% Employer Contribution
- Paid maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave (after 13 weeks of employment)
- 52 weeks of primary caregiver leave (6 months at 100% pay, 13 weeks at Statutory Maternity Pay, 13 weeks unpaid)
- 3 months of secondary caregiver leave at 100% pay
- Unum Life Insurance
- Access to fertility and family-forming health benefits via Fertifa
- Abellio Season Travel Tickets + Cycle-to-Work Scheme
Company values
- Be hard on problems, not people 🙌 We create supportive communities to help people thrive.
- Make a difference 🚀 We solve real problems, working on things that have the biggest impact for our customers and each other.
- Help everyone belong 🤗 We’re building a bank for everyone. We embrace differences and make sure everyone feels welcome.
- Think customer first; grow Monzo safely 🥕 We always do what's best for customers. It's the right thing to do and the safest way to grow.
- Default to transparency 🎤 We’re open with each other and customers unless we have good reason not to be.
- Think big, start small, own it 🌲 We’re ambitious and shoot for the moon, working iteratively to get the best results.
Company HQ
City of London, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Jonas Templestein
(CTO)Founder of HipDial. Former Software Engineer at Starling Bank.
People progressing
Joined in the Customer Operations team. Moved to be a Financial Crime Analyst after 5 months. Then moved again to be a Business Analyst after 2.5 years. Currently working as a Senior Product Manager.
Share this job
View 31 more jobs at Monzo