Principal Backend Engineer

Were on a mission to make money work for everyone.

Were 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 aspersonal 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 andcombine 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!

Were not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo

London / UK Remote This is a unique role were open to discussions on base salary incentive awards tied to your performance share options benefitsTechnology

Principal Engineer: L80 on ourEngineering Progression Framework

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 600 engineers out of roughly 5000 people in total - and we have big ambitions. There are many interesting challenges ahead and were happy for people to move between teams or to specialise whatever you prefer. As an engineer here youd be able to work directly with anyone across the company and we run regular knowledge-sharing sessions so youll 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 youll:

• 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 Monzos 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 youll be using/ What youll be working on:

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• Go to write our application code (theres 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.

Wed 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
• Youve worked on large scale backend distributed or data-intensive systems
• Youre 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

Whats in it for you

This is a unique role were open to discussions on base salary incentive awards tied to your performance share options benefits

Well help you relocate to the UK.

We can sponsor your visa.

This role can be based in our London office but were 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.

1000 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 were making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo were 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.

Were 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 dont need full or birth names at application stage