Staff Backend Engineer, Search

Were looking for somebody with deep experience building, scaling, and tuning complex search products. Were rethinking the search experience in Monzo to enable 10 million customers to find what theyre looking for transactions, products, help articles, people, and more in as few keystrokes as possible.
This role sits in our Core Banking product collective, collaborating closely with ML Platform and a range of product teams across the business with a stake in how search results are ranked and displayed. Youll be a key influence in the long-term product strategy for search at Monzo.
Initially, youll own 3 key challenges:

Launch a global search experience working end-to-end from customer experience in our mobile apps to backend systems, indexes, and data pipelines
Scale search to support all Monzos account types (incl. Business Banking, US) and internationalisation
Optimise results with machine learning models and build feedback loops to measure search performance (e.g. latency and relevance)

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

Partner with engineering leadership in the collective and provide technical leadership on the search domain across Monzos broader engineering organisation.
Work collaboratively with leaders in product, data, research, and design to identify and execute on opportunities that further the organisations goals and strategy.
Oscillate between contributing to high-level planning and strategy and organisational leadership and diving deep into the execution of problems and getting hands-on.
Use your expert knowledge and experience to lead architectural discussions for the most complex systems in the collective.
Keep a high bar for technical excellence in the collective, through your own work, highlighting the work of others and calling out when things havent quite met the bar.
Pro-actively mentor, sponsor and up-level engineers.

What youll 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 (theres 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.
OpenSearch for our first iteration of search infrastructure, 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.
The application journey has 4 key steps
Our interview process for this role has four main stages, most of which can be scheduled on the same day:

Initial Call
System Design Interview
Pair coding exercise
Final interview including a behavioural and a leadership interview

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.
#LI-Remote
#LI-TT1
Equal opportunities for everyone
Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and were making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, were embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2023 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2023 Gender Pay Gap Report.
Were an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.
If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage

You have a track record of technical excellence, delivering resilient systems, ideally behind consumer products.
You have real-world experience working with Machine Learning specialists on search ranking problems.
You solve problems end-to-end, from client applications to backend infrastructure.
You have led technically across 3-4 teams to deliver customer-facing features that leverage ML.
You have a quantitative mindset: you care about outcomes and you make data-informed decisions.
Youre comfortable working in a cross-functional team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and partner teams resolve that ambiguity.
You have demonstrable experience working with stakeholders, especially non-technical stakeholders at the senior level.

Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

Were on a mission to make money work for everyone.
Were 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!
Were not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo
Hear from our team about what it's like working at Monzo