Senior Staff Engineer, Platform

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £135,000 - £184,000 + Share Options | Benefits | Technology

Senior Staff Engineer: L70 on our Engineering Progression Framework

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 450 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.

About Platform:

This role sits in our Platform collective. Our Platform team includes over 75 technical staff (Platform Engineers, Backend Engineers, ML Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Web Engineers, Analytics Engineers, and Data Scientists).

Our mission is to help Monzo scale effectively, empowering our technology teams to build magical experiences for our customers all over the world. We do this by providing a highly available, reliable, secure, compliant, and performant platform of data, software, and infrastructure solutions that:

• meet the needs of our growing business


• accelerate the productivity of Monzo engineers, data scientists, and data users


• maintain cost-efficiency that is at most linear to the growth of our business

Senior Staff Engineer responsibilities:

A Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. You will have company-wide influence, working with other collectives to grow Monzo.

In this role you’ll be focused on improving our platform resilience. You’ll sit at the intersection of our platform and product engineering teams to make it easier for engineers to build resilient systems; improving our platform abstractions and tooling in the process.

More specifically, you’ll:

• Expect to be hands on and deeply technical with code and infrastructure, using your software engineering and system building skills and expertise to lean in and solve deep technical challenges


• Partner with the Engineering Director for Platform and other ICs to provide technical leadership around resiliency across Monzo


• Build a deep understanding of our platform and then work to strengthen the reliability surface that sits between teams - building and enhancing the tools, patterns and guardrails that make resilient choices the easy ones


• Promote and maintain a culture where every engineer feels supported to design, build and operate reliable systems that work on a global scale


• Understand several work-streams across your group, keeping enough context to regularly provide technical advice and challenge 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


• Championing high standards by celebrating success and providing constructive feedback to help the team improve


• Foster a culture of quality within your collective. Proactively champion measures to test work, and make this easy


• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers

🤩What we’re looking for…

To succeed in this role, you will need a strong background in both modern platform tooling and practical software development.

• Software engineering foundations. You have significant professional experience in software engineering, demonstrated by writing, testing, and deploying robust backend services using strongly typed languages.


• Cloud and container experience. You have hands-on experience working with AWS and/or GCP, and you are proficient with Kubernetes. We’re looking for someone with deep experience designing and maintaining global, resilient systems in the cloud.


• Automation and Infrastructure as Code. You are naturally inclined to solve problems through automation and have experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).


• System curiosity: You are deeply curious about systems, enjoy diving deep to investigate complex issues, and understand how modern distributed applications fail and scale.


• Platform mindset: You're excited to build a platform that enables success for everyone at Monzo, focusing on reliability, performance, and developer experience.

Comfort with Ambiguity: You're comfortable working in a fast-paced team that deals with ambiguity and evolving requirements.

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 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 want to be involved in building and protecting a product that you (and over 13 million others) use


• 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

🙌What’s in it for you

💰£135,000 - £184,000 ➕ 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 4 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 3-4 weeks - your schedule is really important to us, so we promise to be as flexible as possible!

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