Principal Engineer

Description
We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join our team and help design, scale and innovate our world-class platform for verifying people globally. We have a unique set of exciting engineering challenges with a fast-growing customer base. As a key member of our engineering team, you will help define the evolution of our technical architecture and our product. You will be instrumental in driving key innovation to our platform over the coming years. As a principal engineer you’ll be interacting with many parts of our technology and the wider organisation.

THE ROLE

Architecture - take a leading role in defining and building the technical architecture that underpins our platform.
Scale, Stability & Performance - design and deliver solutions that will scale with significant volumes, be highly available, performant and resilient.
Ownership - take ownership of solutions, taking them all the way through delivery to adoption by engineering teams.
Innovation & Continuous Improvement - identify and drive areas for technical innovation through activities like building proof of concepts. Drive a culture of continuous improvement whether that be through process or new technologies.
Advisory and Leadership - be a technical expert that the team can refer to for advice or validation of a solution
Technical Standards - help to set some of the engineering standards and best practices to be followed by engineers. Our team is growing as is the codebase - we want to set the best standards as early as possible - helping our developer productivity and making code easy to read and understand.
Our Technology Stack
At Onfido we use a lot of exciting technology. Our engineers are flexible about technology and like to pick the right tool for the job:

Python, Ruby, and Elixir for our service code
React and Redux for frontend work
Tensorflow for ML/CV
Kubernetes and Docker to package and run services
AWS for underlying infrastructure
As an architect, you will help influence some of these decisions, create solutions using these and also help us set best practices for these tools.

You can learn more about our product engineering team and the work we do on our blog.

THE COMPANY

We’re building the new identity standard for the internet.

Whether you want to open a bank account or hire a car, our lives are moving online. That means millions of everyday interactions now happen digitally—without ever meeting anyone face-to-face. Increasingly, our identities are becoming the new currency which we use to access online services. But with half the world being unbanked, and identity fraud on the rise, that’s becoming more and more difficult. So our mission is to create an open world, where identity is the key to access.

We use machine learning to assess whether a user’s government-issued ID is genuine or fraudulent, and then compare it against their facial biometrics. As a global leader in computer vision, our AI learns to identity fraud as it evolves over time. Our goal is to apply cutting-edge research to build powerful, simple products that drive inclusion and safety online—without compromising on user privacy.

That’s how we give companies like Revolut, Zipcar and Bitstamp the assurance they need to onboard users remotely and securely across 195 countries… and we’re just getting started!

Founded in 2012, we're a diverse, global team of 250 technologists spread across 6 countries. We've also received over $60m in funding from world-class technology investors including Salesforce and Microsoft.

You can learn more about our team and the work we do on our Onfido blog and our Tech blog.

Requirements
Strong background as a Software Engineer
Extensive Experience of designing complex solutions and microservice architectures
Proven experience of leading engineers on large, cross-cutting projects
Experience of leading the implementation and adoption of new solutions
An expert in at least one and a broad exposure to software languages including Python, Ruby, Javascript and more
Solid background deploying large applications over multiple regions/globally with high availability and consistency in mind
Experience designing complex data architectures and pipelines
Familiarity with designing containerized cloud environments, preferably in AWS using docker/Kubernetes
Experience as a thought leader/standard-bearer for engineers
Good Communication and organization skills
Experience with mentoring others
Ability to influence without positional authority.
To be a great fit at Onfido, we look for individuals who share our values. We have over 35 nationalities in our growing team, making this an exciting and culturally enriching place to work. Check out the team and Life at Onfido!

Benefits
We're committed to making Onfido a fantastic place to work, so we go to great lengths to give you what you need to succeed. You’ll receive:

A meaningful equity allocation
25 days holiday, plus bank holidays
Pension with The People’s Pension (employer contribution 4% of base salary)
A fully stocked kitchen with unlimited breakfast, drinks, snacks and fresh fruit every day
Bupa Health Cash Plan (Level 2)
Sanctus mental health coaching
Flexible working
Payroll Giving
Volunteer days - 2 days paid time off per year, in addition to holiday allowance, to volunteer
Subsidised gym or sports, therapy, home cleaning or childcare up to £50 per month
Office massages from Urban
Nutrition advice
Free weekly yoga classes
Regular 5-a-side football matches
Dedicated learning opportunities including language classes (currently Spanish, French and English), an unlimited budget for software and books, a training budget for conferences and regular lunch and learns
Quarterly team socials and a budget for cross-team coffees and lunches
Open and transparent culture—we come together on a weekly basis for a global forum (OnFriday) where we share updates and strategic plans, and engage with each other informally over food and drink.
OTHER INFORMATION

The interview process will involve:

Simple profile matching from us - assessing your application against the role
A two-way conversation where we both can find out a bit more about each other
Do at home task where you give a bit of an insight into how you approach problem-solving
On-site two-way technical and cultural conversations with the team
This process should take around two to three weeks, depending on diaries.

Once complete and provided we make you an offer, we will ask you to undertake a background check prior to joining Onfido. We consider this necessary in order to protect Onfido, our clients, and the personal data that we process.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at Onfido. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.