Senior Backend Engineer Payments at Monzo

Senior Backend Engineer, Payments

At Monzo we’re aiming to build the best current account in the world. We are always keen to hear from capable, creative engineers who want to help us accomplish that goal 🚀

Our backend engineers have a variety of different backgrounds

We have several non-graduates; only some of us studied Computer Science; one of the team has a degree in Marketing; some of us have worked in huge companies; some have only ever worked in startups; others are former consultants. As long as you enjoy learning new things, we’d love to talk to you. We do not ask for formal qualifications or degree requirements for any of our engineering roles.

We are actively creating an equitable environment for all of our engineers to thrive

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. We provide a sponsorship framework in Engineering for women and people of colour; all of our leaders are trained on privilege awareness and we are creating partnerships with organisations dedicated to supporting underrepresented groups. You can read more in our 2020 Diversity and Inclusion report.

We encourage an open and transparent working environment

You can get involved in any aspect of the business you are interested in and, following Stripe’s example, all emails in the company are visible in an email archive. We contribute to open source software as much as possible. Our blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do!

Payments 💸

The goal of Payments is to ensure that making and receiving a payment is a seamless, safe and delightful experience. We’re at the heart of the bank and own some of the core infrastructure and services that make Monzo, Monzo… Hello Hot Coral Cards 💖

Engineering squads within Payments carry out a mixture of project and operational work to generate revenue, automate manual processes, implement key controls and stay compliant with the various payment schemes we participate in.

Previous payments team projects have included building our very own Mastercard processor (from scratch), replacing a third-party Faster Payments Gateway with our own internal gateway, improving the international money transfer experience for our customers and supporting other teams within Monzo as they build innovative new features and services using our Payments infrastructure e.g. Monzo Flex, virtual cards & Monzo Pay. We’ve delivered industry leading Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and 3D Secure V2 (3DSV2) implementations. And we make sure our critical payments infrastructure and services continue to be reliable, correct and high performing.

At the moment we’re very interested in finding a specific ‘shape’ of backend engineer: someone who’s had some experience within a payments focused engineering team working with other engineers and disciplines and potentially leading projects. As a senior engineer within payments you should expect to split your time between writing code, designing systems and services, mentoring other engineers, and working with your squad to make project decisions, estimates and risk based prioritisation.

Monzo works in project-based sprints in small, interdisciplinary teams

We have around 150 engineers out of roughly 1,400 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 a senior engineer here you'd be able to work directly with folks from across the company, and we run regular knowledge-sharing sessions so you’ll learn heaps about everything from how banks work to effective communication.

At Monzo you will get to work with a lot of exciting new technology.

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies within Payments:

• Go to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial here)
• Amazon Key Spaces for most persistent data storage (Recently replaced Cassandra)
• Big Query for data reporting and analytics
• Kafka for our asynchronous message queue
• Envoy Proxy for RPC
• Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services
• AWS for most of our infrastructure
• We also have two physical datacenter sites with actual cables to connect to different payment schemes such as Mastercard and SWIFT

You should apply if:

• you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
• you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing
• you like doing innovative work under the hood to make things work better
• you want to be involved in building and maintaining services that power our award winning bank
• you’re keen to learn more about new technologies and the arcane inner workings of the payments industry
• you’re comfortable working in a fast paced environment in a team that deals with ambiguity
• you have some experience with strongly-typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.)
• you're strong on systems thinking and distributed design

Bonus points for (but not essential):

• Experience working with payment schemes or within the financial services/fintech sector
• team and project leadership experience

Logistics

Salary is around £90,000 - £116,000 plus stock options and other benefits.

We can help you relocate to London & we can sponsor visas.

This role can be based in our London office, but we're open to distributed working (with ad hoc meetings in London once COVID is over).

There's no closing date for this job.

We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Diversity and inclusion is a priority for us – if we want to solve problems for people around the world, our team has to represent our customers. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them. You can read more about diversity and inclusion on our blog.

If you prefer to work part-time, we'll make this happen whenever we can - whether this is to help you meet other commitments or strike a great work-life balance.

Our interview process is normally a phone interview, a coding task and call to discuss it, and 2-3 hours of onsite interviews that can be conducted via hangouts as well. We promise not to ask you any brain teasers or trick questions. We might design a system together on a whiteboard, the same way we often work together, but we won’t make you write code on one.

Equal Opportunity Statement

At Monzo, embracing diversity in all of its forms and 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.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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