Staff Engineer - Fullstack Java

OakNorth is a profitable business that has supported the growth of thousands of businesses.

You’ll lead the migration of a critical Java/React service to Python/React while maintaining the performance of our core banking platform and its microservices ecosystem. Over the next two years, you’ll help scale our systems to manage increasing customer data and onboard a significantly larger user base by 2025 using a mix of modernized and new technologies.

In this role, you’ll also build and lead new engineering teams, fostering collaboration and driving technical innovation to overcome complex challenges. This is your chance to make a tangible impact on a rapidly evolving platform.

The role

• As a Staff Engineer you’ll work with product and engineering across multiple squads to ensure the right trade-offs are being made and that dependencies and communication are managed effectively. Staff Engineers are the most visible engineers in the organisation and demonstrate technical excellence and our cultural values across all squads and to teams across the wider organisation.
• Have a strong technical background, including 8+ years of experience designing and engineering large scale systems.
• Lead squads to sensible architectural decisions on the most complex technical problems.
• 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.
• 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 comfortably organised amongst chaos.
• You are a broad thinker and have the capability to see the potential impact of decisions across the wider business.

Tech stack

• We’re pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use now:
• TypeScript, React, styled-components
• Java & Python
• PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
• Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
• AWS, GCP
• ECS Fargate, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

How we expect you to work ️

• We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:
• 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. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.
• 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. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame-free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.
• Seek to understand our users – We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users’ needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment – Seamless delivery of changes into an environment – without manual intervention – is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.
• Test outside-in, test first – TDD keeps us confident in moving fast and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset – writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.
• You build it, you run it ️ – We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, has the opportunity to lead delivery of features from start to finish.
• Be cloud native ️ – We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently. Where SaaS tools help us achieve more productivity and better quality results for a cheap price, we use these to automate low value tasks.

How we expect you to behave ️

• We embrace difference 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

• Flexible, Hybrid Working – A flexible, Hybrid team with a dedicated London office available 5 days a week to use as we want to.
• 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 – We run 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 and dinners on OakNorth – or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support – We offer the cycle to work scheme and EV scheme.

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