Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Contract type
Part-time
Work mode
Hybrid
Experience
Lead / principal · Not stated

Level inferred from job title

Job description

A hands-on engineering leadership (IC) role at Monzo, providing technical and product direction across multiple squads (30–70+ engineers) while coding and leading architecture.

At a glance

Employment
Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
Work mode
Hybrid
Pay
GBP 155,000 – 200,000 / year

What you'll do

  • Partner with Engineering Directors to shape the technical and product direction of a collective, providing leadership across multiple squads (30–70+ engineers) and ensuring alignment with company-wide priorities
  • Be hands on in both coding and architecture, leading from the front
  • Partner closely with Product and Design leadership to define strategy, shape roadmaps, and make high-quality trade-offs that maximise business and customer impact across the collective
  • Mobilise teams across your collective around high-impact problems, creating clarity, alignment and momentum, injecting urgency when needed, or slowing things down to ensure safety and long-term sustainability
  • Lead and influence architectural direction for the most complex systems, ensuring cohesive, scalable designs across multiple teams and aligning local decisions with the broader system strategy
  • Set and uphold a high bar for technical excellence across the collective, 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 we're looking for

  • A track record of leading complex, high-impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams
  • Strong technical judgment combined with product and business awareness, making pragmatic trade-offs
  • Experience working on scalable backend, distributed or data-intensive systems
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams define direction and execute
  • Ability to influence and align senior stakeholders across engineering, product and beyond
  • Care about outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions
  • Enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for other engineers

Your team

Engineering

Around 650 engineers out of roughly 5,500 people in total; engineers can move between teams or specialise.

Benefits

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 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

  • Base salary £155,000 - £200,000 + Equity
  • We'll help you relocate to the UK
  • We can sponsor your visa
  • 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
  • Plus lots more

How to get hired

  1. 1Recruiter Call
  2. 2Initial Call
  3. 3System Design Interview
  4. 4Take home task or pair coding exercise
  5. 5Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview

Apply

Direct apply at Monzo

Opens the job posting at Monzo

About Monzo

We're on a mission to make money work for everyone.

A UK bank that started as a prepaid card and now offers personal and business bank accounts, joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more to come beyond. UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with Monzo.

Mission

Making money work for everyone.

Key facts

  • roughly 5,500 people in total
  • London, UK
  • Banking
  • Around 650 engineers out of roughly 5,500 people in total
  • Started as a prepaid card and grew its product offering over the last 10 years in the UK
  • Offers personal and business bank accounts, joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK
  • UK customers can save, invest and combine their pensions with Monzo
  • Known for hot coral cards, get-paid-early feature, financial education on social media and award winning customer service
  • Contributes to open source software

What they value

  • We're not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo
  • Diversity and inclusion are a priority