Senior Fullstack Engineer - Business Banking - Core Banking

Overview

At OakNorth, we are on a mission to empower the UK's most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we have lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers - all while fuelling the UK economy.

Team Mission

The Core Banking team owns the foundational systems that power our financial products and ensure the integrity of our data and processes. Own the financial accounts domain, including the design, creation, and lifecycle of financial products, ensuring they are compliant, scalable, and seamlessly integrated with the ledger and third-party systems. Manage our ledger (Thought Machine Vault Core), covering its integration, data integrity, and technical migrations, while maintaining a close partnership with the Thought Machine team. Build resilient, event-driven systems that ensure data consistency and traceability across internal platforms and external services. Support financial and regulatory reporting, including reconciliations and compliance obligations such as FSCS. Provide the systems and data models that ensure auditability, accuracy, and trust, from customer balances to external reports.

The role

• Have a strong technical background, including 5+ years of experience designing and engineering large-scale systems.
• Measure your success in terms of business impact, not lines of code.
• Internalise the best ideas from across the organisation, humbly setting a vision that others can get behind.
• Embrace DevOps culture: You build it, you run it.
• Work well cross-functionally and earn trust from co-workers at all levels.
• Care deeply about mentorship and growing your colleagues.
• Prefer simple solutions and designs over complex ones.
• Enjoy working with a diverse group of people with different areas of expertise.
• You challenge the existing approach when you see the cliff edge racing towards us, but also get on board once the options have been debated and the team has made a decision.
• You are a broad thinker and have the capability to see the potential impact of decisions across the wider business.
• Utilise GenerativeAI: Leverage GenAI tools to increase productivity and enhance decision-making processes within the role.

It would be an added bonus if you have experience with/knowledge of transaction monitoring, financial crime prevention, AML, and fraud detection.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with transaction systems, statements, and reconciliation processes.
• Experience using Thought Machine Vault Core.
• Experience building and owning production Python systems.

Technology

We are pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use at the moment:

• Python
• PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
• TypeScript, React, styled-components
• Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
• AWS, GCP
• ECS Fargate, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

How we expect you to work

• Collaborate - We work in cross-functional, mission-driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs - Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal.
• Practice continuous improvement - We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used.
• Seek to understand our users - We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users' needs.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment - Seamless delivery of changes into an environment without manual intervention is essential for us.
• Test outside-in, test first - TDD keeps us confident in moving fast, and deploying regularly.
• You build it, you run it - We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features.
• Be cloud native - We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently.

How we expect you to behave

We embrace differences and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:

• A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all.
• Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together.
• Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question.
• No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely.

What makes working here better

This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There is no fixed requirement for days in the office; instead, we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully.

• Work-life balance - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary & equity - We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
• Good kit - Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials - The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
• Company socials - A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts.
• Lunches and dinners on OakNorth - or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support - We offer the cycle to work and EV scheme.

About Us

We are OakNorth Bank and we embolden entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions, understand their markets, and apply data intelligence to everyday decisions to scale successfully at pace. Banking should be barrier-free. It is a belief at our very core, inspired by our entrepreneurial spirit, driven by the unmet financial needs of millions, and delivered by our data-driven tools.

Our story

OakNorth Bank was built on the foundations of frustrations with old-school banking. In 2005, when our founders tried to get capital for their data analytics company, the computer said 'no'. Unfortunately, all major banks in the UK were using the same computer - and it was broken. Why was it so difficult for a profitable business with impressive cashflow, retained clients, and clear commercial success to get a loan? The industry was backward-looking and too focused on historic financials, rather than future potential. So, what if there was a bank, founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs? One that offered a dramatically better borrowing experience for businesses? No more what ifs, OakNorth Bank exists.