Staff Backend Engineer, Monzo
Financial Crime
£140-190k
+Share Options
More information about location
Digital-only bank platform and marketplace
Job no longer available
Digital-only bank platform and marketplace
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
£140-190k
+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 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 the job involves
- 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
- A Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Staff Engineer in the Fincrime 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 Staff Engineer in Fincrime, 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 Fincrime
Application process
- Recruiter Call
- Initial Call
- System Design Interview
- Take home task or pair coding exercise
- 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
Salary benchmarks
Otta's take
Sam Franklin
CEO of Otta
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.
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
$438.1m
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
Founders
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.
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