Principal Backend Engineer

We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone. We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking. With our hot coral cards and get‑paid‑early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award‑winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers. We’re not about selling products – we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo.

Role Overview

A Principal Engineer at Monzo is a hands‑on engineering leadership (IC) position. You’ll partner with Engineering and Product Leaders to shape the technical and product direction of Monzo, guiding a collective of 100+ engineers and driving alignment with company‑wide priorities. You’ll remain hands‑on in coding and architecture for complex, high‑risk or novel areas, identify high‑leverage opportunities, mobilise teams, lead architectural direction, set a high bar for technical excellence, and mentor senior engineers and future leaders.

Responsibilities

• Partner with and guide Engineering and Product Leaders to shape the technical and product direction of Monzo, providing company‑shaping leadership across collectives and driving alignment with company‑wide priorities.
• Remain hands‑on in both coding and architecture where it adds the most leverage, especially in complex, high‑risk or novel areas.
• Actively identify high‑leverage opportunities for Monzo and set the direction of engineering effort toward 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 / working on

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• Go to write our application code.
• AWS for most of our production infrastructure and GCP for most of our data infrastructure.
• Feast for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.

Qualifications

• Track record of leading complex, high‑impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams, domains or business areas.
• Think in multi‑year horizons to look around corners and build for the future, identifying opportunities before they present themselves.
• Strong technical judgment combined with product and business awareness, making pragmatic trade‑offs.
• Experience working on large‑scale backend, distributed or data‑intensive systems.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams define direction and execute.
• Influence and align senior stakeholders across engineering, product and beyond.
• Caring about outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions and iterate.
• Enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for other engineers.

Benefits

• Unique role with base salary and incentive awards tied to performance, share options and benefits.
• Help with relocation to the UK.
• Sponsor your visa.
• Open to distributed working within the UK, with ad‑hoc meetings in London.
• Flexible working hours and trust to work enough hours to do your job well.
• £1,000 learning budget each year for books, training courses and conferences.
• Set up to work from home; all employees receive a MacBook and, for fully remote workers, extra support for home‑office setup.

Location & Salary

Location: London, UK (remote within the UK also possible). Salary and bonus packages are negotiable and will be discussed during the interview process.

Equal Opportunity

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.