Senior Staff Backend Engineer

📍London / UK Remote | 💰 £140,000 - £165,000 + Share Options |Benefits | Technology

About Customer Operations at Monzo:

The Customer Operations team provides tech-led and human support experiences for now over 10 million  customers. We don’t just solve customer problems - we aim to improve customer satisfaction and product engagement by providing effortless, fast, and empathetic support. 

Our Operations tech team has three focus areas:

1. Creating in-app experiences that enable customers to solve their own problems. As well as building customer experiences ourselves, we help all product teams at Monzo build better products by developing a system of reusable components that other teams can use.
2. Tooling that enables our ~3,500 customer support agents to give the best possible support for customers and automating away things that distract from that.
3. Workforce management systems that ensure our customers are connected to high-quality support as quickly as possible, efficiently route customer requests to the right support person at the right time and manage forecasting and scheduling of a ~3,500 strong workforce.

This role will primarily focus on our customer support tooling and workforce management systems.

As a Senior Staff Engineer:

A Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo is a technical (IC) leadership position. As a Senior Staff Engineer in the Operations collective at Monzo, you will:

• Partner with the Engineering Director supporting the collective and provide technical leadership across 3+ squads and ~20 engineers.
• Work collaboratively with product, data and operational leaders to identify and execute on opportunities that further the organisation’s goals and strategy, bringing the right level of clarity, urgency and rigour as appropriate.
• Work on solving multi-faceted optimisation problems at scale, such as how to maximise the leverage of technologies like LLMs to aid human workers or how to forecast, schedule and efficiently route requests through a workforce of thousands of people and more generally solve high quality customer support at scale.
• Oscillate between contributing to high-level planning and strategy and organisational leadership and diving deep into the execution of problems and getting hands-on as necessary.
• Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems in the collective. You’ll do this in order to arrive at solutions that are robust and optimal given the context. 
• Keep a high bar for technical excellence in the collective, through your own work, highlighting the work of others and calling out when things haven’t quite met the bar.
• Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers.

What you’ll be using: 

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies, please note direct experience in these technologies is not required and our interview process can be completed in any language:

• Go to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial here)
• Cassandra for most persistent data storage
• Kafka for our asynchronous message queue
• Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services 
• AWS for most of our production infrastructure and GCP for most of our data infrastructure.
• React for customer support tooling.
• Feast for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.
• GPT and Vertex models for Large Language Model support.

🤩We’d love to hear from you if… 

• You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products.
• You have experience in solving human + tech problems at scale.
• You have technically led across 3-4 teams to solve complex optimisation problems.
• You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you make data-informed decisions.
• You’re comfortable working in a cross-functional team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and partner team resolve that ambiguity.
• You have experience with or a strong desire to work with Machine Learning specialists to apply various models (including large language models) to real-world problems.
• You have demonstrable experience working with stakeholders, especially non-technical stakeholders at the senior level.

🌈 The application journey has 4 key steps

Our interview process involves four main stages after an informal recruiter call: 

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

This process should take around 3-4 weeks - your schedule is really important to us, so we promise to be as flexible as possible! 

You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions or want to talk through reasonable adjustments ahead of or during application please us at any point on tech-hiring@monzo.com

We have some guidelines on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ace an application and interview at Monzo. You can read them here. Please also use that email to let us know if there's anything we can do to make your application process easier for you, because of disability, neurodiversity or any other personal reason.

One of our staff engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.

🙌What’s in it for you

💰£140,000 - £165,000 ➕ share options.

✈️ We’ll help you relocate to the UK.

✅ We can sponsor your visa. 

📍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 offer 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.

🏡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. 

➕ Plus lots more! Read our full list of benefits.

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