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Griffin
UK
Posted on: 03 March 2024
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Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Tooling
Hi, we’re Griffin! We’re the bank for companies who want to build and launch financial products.
We're rapidly heading towards a future where most of us access financial services through technology companies rather than high street banks. All sorts of companies are now embedding financial products into their apps and user journeys so that their customers can seamlessly make payments, manage expenses, take out loans, save, invest, and do more.
The problem is that companies are still dependent on legacy banking infrastructure if they want to offer regulated financial products. They need to either partner directly with an (slow-moving, risk-averse) incumbent bank and/or stitch together middleware from various Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers. This process is slow, expensive, and complex and makes it very hard for companies to get new financial products off the ground.
At Griffin, we want to change this.
We want to make it easy for companies to bring finance to their customers at the point of greatest relevance. So, we built a bank.
But not just any bank! Griffin is a technology platform and a bank: fully regulated, API-first, developer-centric, and purpose-built to serve innovative fintechs and brands who want to build and embed financial products.
Our culture is our most important asset, and one of the ways we safeguard it is by being extremely intentional about hiring the right people. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.
We also believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments. That’s why we’re transparent by default, and we encourage open discussion and challenge across all levels of the organisation. We’re also remote-first, asynchronous, and fully flexible - because you're the expert on how and when you do your best work.
Cloud engineering is a small team within the larger engineering group. We’re ultimately responsible for making sure that the systems are in place to test, build, deploy, and run our applications quickly, correctly, and securely.
Rather than "move fast and break things", we aim to move thoughtfully and to make few mistakes. We are an output-driven environment that operates with extreme autonomy; people are free to keep their own hours and we don't micro-manage each other.
Our infrastructure is all in AWS. The core database is FoundationDB, and applications are built using Bazel and deployed as containers to Kubernetes. We currently use CloudFormation Development Kit (CDK) to define our infrastructure-as-code and deploy our apps, which is done automatically on merge by CircleCI.
An ability for self-directed learning is a must. We don’t expect you to have experience with every product we use, but we do want you to have a grasp of the underlying principles of most and be able to pick up the specifics as you go.
You should have a good knowledge of software engineering practices, especially with regards to security and testing. You will be writing code for internal tools as well as infrastructure as part of this role, and we want that to meet the same standard as application code written by the product engineering teams.
The cloud engineering team is often directed by the technical requirements of other parts of the company, so you need to be able to research new products and make sensible suggestions rapidly.
Deeper knowledge in any of the following areas, allowing you to critically examine some of our existing systems and processes for potential improvements or alternatives soon after joining, is ideal:
- Infrastructure as code
- Core cloud provider services (IAM, VPC, compute, object storage etc)
- Kubernetes (managed or otherwise)
- Software engineering (Any of Typescript, Python, Go, or Clojure)
- Distributed systems
- Build tooling
- IP networking
Operational experience with any of the specific products we currently use (AWS, Bazel, CDK, FoundationDB, CircleCI) is a further advantage, but not required.
As an Engineer in the Cloud team, you'll be responsible for building, operating and monitoring our production infrastructure. We are building a bank that will handle thousands of transactions per second. Correctness, performance, and reliability are paramount.
This is a programming job, with a focus on infrastructure and tooling. You will have the opportunity to specialise in one or both, but in either case you will be writing code for tools used by engineers in other teams, and for administration of the systems and services we deploy.
The kinds of things you'll work on include:
- Writing infrastructure as code to configure our AWS accounts and regions in a standard and repeatable way.
- Managing our base infrastructure, Kubernetes, and FoundationDB.
- Writing internal tools to turn what are currently periodic manual processes into automated ones.
- Speeding up our Continuous Deployment pipeline.
- Developing our resilience from automated availability zone failure recovery to full regional failover.
- Supporting other engineering teams with new infrastructure requests, and building out self-service tooling for them to use in future.
- Improving our scalability with deployment and cluster autoscaling based on internal custom metrics.
- Writing internal tools to make monitoring, logging, alerting, and debugging easier and faster.
- Writing code to verify our systems are correct after power / network etc. failures, a restore from backup, or disaster-recovery failover to secondary regions.
We are an early stage startup and we're working hard to expand our benefits package. We're planning to add to this list in the future.
- 25 days off a year + bank holidays
- Flexible, remote-friendly working - including supporting home office setup
- Tax-advantaged stock options under HMRC's Company Share Option Plan (CSOP)
- Auto-enrolment into company pension scheme
- Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months at full pay
- Private medical insurance and life insurance (provided by Vitality and AIG respectively)
Are we your next move? Apply via the link below, if there's a match our Talent team will reach out to schedule an initial conversation and talk you through our interview process in detail.
N.B: We have a small London office in Moorgate, and we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About half of the company is based within occasional commuting distance of London, the other half is full-time remote.
Our goal is for Griffin to proportionally represent the diversity of the working population in society. We’re working to ensure that Griffin is a supportive, empowering and inclusive environment for every member of our team — whatever your combination of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, nationality, neurodiversity, and religious beliefs. If you’re part of a group that is under-represented in fintech, we’d love to hear from you
Griffin Bank Ltd request that recruitment agencies do not speculatively submit CVs to any employee or associate of our company unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our Talent team.
Any CVs sent to any member of our team on a speculative basis will not be recognised and we will not accept liability for any fee or commission should we subsequently employ a candidate who applied to us directly or was introduced by an instructed agency that may also have been submitted speculatively by an uninstructed agency.
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