Senior Staff Engineer - Platform

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.

Responsibilities

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

• 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.

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial)
• for most persistent data storage
• for our asynchronous message queue
• and to schedule and run our services
• for most of our production infrastructure and for most of our data infrastructure.
• for internal Web dashboards
• 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