Backend Engineer

About Us
Griffin is a London-based pre-authorisation "platform" bank that provides safeguarded and client money (CASS) bank accounts to technology-driven organisations. We are not only branchless but API-first.
We see a world in which people and firms get most of their financial services and products from non-bank entities rather than high street banks. In this future, these non-bank firms will still need to partner with banks in order to safeguard and ring-fence their customer's deposits and to programmatically manage access to these funds. We aim to be the world leader in providing these capabilities.
The team is still small, at 13 people. We have the bulk of our executive team in place (CEO, CRO, CFO, COO, CTO) and an in-house engineering team of 5 engineers. Our Board is still being assembled but even today has an independent Chairman and next month will appoint another independent non-executive director. About half of the leadership team has prior experience setting up a new bank in the UK - this isn't our first time and we know what we're doing.
Culture
We are dedicated and careful stewards of our culture. 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.
The Role
As a backend engineer you'll be responsible for building out our core banking systems, which are responsible for handling compliance as well as managing accounts and transactions. As a (hopefully soon-to-be) wholesale and clearing bank, we're building for scale from day one - 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.
Our engineering team is currently small and close-knit (5 people, plus our CTO).
Our technology stack is Clojure, Kafka, Datomic, and Kubernetes.

Requirements

At least 2 years professional experience, and ideally 4+.
Some prior Clojure experience is required.
Either a very strong distributed systems background or a healthy amount of full-stack exposure (i.e. experience integrating front and backends directly).

Nice to haves

Experience with the other parts of our stack (Kafka, Kube, AWS, Dataomic) is preferred, but not required.
Similarly, relevant domain experience in payments or core banking systems is a plus, but not mandatory.
Experience working well with small teams, ideally in fast-paced start-up environments.

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
A Pleo card for covering work expenses
Private medical insurance and life insurance (provided by AXA and AIG respectively)
A weekly team lunch on Griffin (even when you're working remotely)
Cycle to work scheme

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: Our London office is located in Moorgate and we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About half of the company is based in London and may return to working in an office post-COVID, and the other half is full-time remote.

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
A Pleo card for covering work expenses
Private medical insurance and life insurance (provided by AXA and AIG respectively)
A weekly team lunch on Griffin (even when you're working remotely)
Cycle to work scheme

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: Our London office is located in Moorgate and we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About half of the company is based in London and may return to working in an office post-COVID, and the other half is full-time remote. We are currently able to support remote employees based in: Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Portugal