Software Engineer in London

About Griffin

We’re Griffin! We’re the bank for companies who want to build and launch financial products.

Our context

We’re rapidly heading towards a future where most of us access financial services through technology companies rather than high street banks. All sorts of companies are now embedding financial products into their apps and user journeys so that their customers can seamlessly make payments, manage expenses, take out loans, save, invest, and do more.

The problem is that companies are still dependent on legacy banking infrastructure if they want to offer regulated financial products. They need to either partner directly with an incumbent bank and/or stitch together middleware from various Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers. This process is slow, expensive, and complex and makes it very hard for companies to get new financial products off the ground. At Griffin, we want to change this.

Our purpose

We want to make it easy for companies to bring finance to their customers at the point of greatest relevance. So, we built a bank. But not just any bank! Griffin is a technology platform and a bank: fully regulated, API-first, developer-centric, and purpose-built to serve innovative fintechs and brands who want to build and embed financial products.

Our culture

Our culture is our most important asset, and one of the ways we safeguard it is by being extremely intentional about hiring the right people. We won’t hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they’re otherwise extremely qualified.

We also believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments. That’s why we’re transparent by default, and we encourage open discussion and challenge across all levels of the organisation. We’re also remote-first, asynchronous, and fully flexible - because you’re the expert on how and when you do your best work.

The Craft Function:

We have seven Engineering teams within Craft: Banking, Infrastructure, Onboarding and Financial Crime, Payments, Platform, Cards and Tooling. Each team is cross-functional, with the Product, Design and Engineering skills required to discover, shape, architect, build, test and run end-to-end features.

Rather than "move fast and break things", we aim to move thoughtfully and make few mistakes. We are an output-driven environment that operates with extreme autonomy; people are free to keep their own hours and we don’t micromanage each other.

Our backend stack is Clojure, FoundationDB, Bazel, Kubernetes and AWS. Our frontend stack is CLJS, Reframe, Reagent, React, Stitches, Storybook and Playroom.

What will you be doing here?

As a backend engineer, you’ll be responsible for building out one of our core product pillars. You’ll be working in one of our Craft teams – exactly which will depend on your background, the current team need and your preference. Day to day, this could be working on banking domain features like onboarding, transaction monitoring, ledgers, payment rails, or 'normal' SaaS app features like invoicing, webhooks or roles and permissions.

At Griffin, we support two progression paths: one focused on individual contributions and one focused on people leadership. This role is primarily centred on individual contribution, with a strong focus on hands‐on skills. That said, there’s also the opportunity to move into a people management role over time if that’s something you’d like to explore.

Who are you?

The ideal candidate for this job will have most of the following:

• At least two years’ professional experience. We’re hiring across multiple levels, from strong mid-level engineers to senior or lead engineers who are excited to help shape our technical direction.
• Some functional programming experience, ideally with Clojure, but we’re open to others such as Scheme, Haskell, Erlang, Elixir or Scala too.
• Either a very strong distributed systems background or a healthy amount of full-stack exposure (i.e. experience integrating front and backends directly).
• Experience collaborating with Product Managers and UX/UI Designers to build products that solve customer needs.

Nice to haves

• Experience with the other parts of our stack (Bazel, FoundationDB, Kube, AWS).
• Have worked in domains that are relevant to what we’re building. This could be banking, payments, billing or the wider fintech space.
• Experience working with small teams, ideally in fast‐paced start‐up environments.

The interview process

• Get to know you with a member of our Talent team.
• Take-home task looking at your writing and coding in Clojure.
• Discussion around your task to learn about your software engineering craftsmanship and mindset. We’ll also dig into your experience to date and how you collaborate with one of our engineering leaders.
• Discussion around deep technical topics with peers, system design skills and knowledge of APIs.
• Griffin culture interview with Grifflings outside of the Engineering Guild, and an opportunity to meet one of our founders.

How do I apply?

Are we your next move? Apply via the link below, if there’s a match our Talent team will reach out to schedule an initial conversation and talk you through what happens next.

We’re remote-first. We have a small London office in Moorgate, but we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About a third of the company is based within occasional commuting distance of London, the rest are full‐time remote.

Under representation

Our goal is for Griffin to proportionally represent the diversity of the working population in society. We’re working to ensure that Griffin is a supportive, empowering and inclusive environment for every member of our team — whatever your combination of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, nationality, neurodiversity, and religious beliefs. If you’re part of a group that is under‐represented in fintech, we’d love to hear from you.