Software Engineer

About Griffin

Hi, we’re Griffin! We’re the bank for companies who want to build and launch financial products.

Our context

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.

Our purpose

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.

Learn more about what we do.

Our culture

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.

Learn more about our culture.

The Engineering Team:

As with most of the company the engineering team is still in it's infancy. We have grown quickly within the last year to our current team size of 23 which is made up of the CTO, VP of Engineering, Engineering Manager and 20 engineers split across backend, infrastructure and fullstack specialisations.

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 backend stack is Clojure, FoundationDB, Kubernetes and AWS

Our frontend stack is CLJS, Reframe, Reagent, React, Stitches, Storybook, and Playroom

Who are you?

The ideal candidate for this job will have most of the following:

• Ideally at least 2 years professional experience.
• Some professional functional programming experience.
• Either a very strong distributed systems background or a healthy amount of full-stack exposure (i.e. experience integrating front and backends directly).
• Experience collaborating with Product Managers and UX/UI Designers to build products that solve customer needs

Nice to haves

• Experience with the other parts of our stack (Event-streaming tools, Kube, AWS, Databases).
• Relevant domain experience in payments or core banking systems.
• Experience working with small teams, ideally in fast-paced start-up environments.

What will you be doing here?

We're building for scale from day one. As a new bank with an integrated BaaS platform our infrastructure has to scale to tens of thousands of requests per second, with all systems fully correct and available. We'll also need fully-functional integrations with a half-dozen different payment rails such as Faster Payments, Direct Debit, CHAPS, and various card networks.

The interview process

1. Get to know you with a member of Talent
2. Deep dive into your professional experience, software engineering craftsmanship, collaboration skills, and mindset, with one of our engineering leaders.
3. Take home task looking at your writing and coding in Clojure.
4. Discussion around deep technical topics with peers, system design skills, and knowledge of APIs
5. Griffin culture interview with Grifflings outside of the Engineering Guild, and an opportunity to meet one of our founders.

What can we offer you?

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)

How do I apply?

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.