Principal Backend Engineer

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 This is a unique role, we're open to discussions on base salary + incentive awards tied to your performance + share options + benefits | Technology

Principal Engineer: L80 on our Engineering Progression Framework

About our Engineering Teams:

We have around 600 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.

Principal Engineer Responsibilities:

A Principal Engineer at Monzo is a hands on engineering leadership (IC) position. As a Principal Engineer you’ll:

• 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 Monzo’s 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 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 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


• You’ve worked on large scale backend, distributed or data-intensive systems


• You’re 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

🙌What’s in it for you

💰 This is a unique role, we're open to discussions on base salary + incentive awards tied to your performance + 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 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.