Infrastructure 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 an Infrastructure Engineer, you'll be responsible for building, operating and monitoring our production infrastructure. We are planning on becoming a bank that will handle thousands of transactions per second. Correctness, performance, and reliability are paramount.

We are a Clojure shop, and use it in places where other teams might use shell scripting or YAML. We've written our own version of Terraform in-house, as a Clojure library. This is a programming job, with a focus on infrastructure and tooling. Up to 50% time spent on application development is possible.

While the company is small, our technology, processes and security will always have to be 2 levels more advanced than you'd expect for a company of our size.

As a small startup (the engineering team is currently 5 + CTO), the list of projects is always changing, but the kinds of things you'll work on include:

• Writing Clojure to configure AWS infrastructure using our custom Infrastructure-as-Code tool
• Writing Clojure to verify our systems are correct after power / network etc. failures
• Writing chatbots to automate common ops runbooks
• Writing internal tools to make monitoring, logging, alerting and debugging easier and faster
• Writing code to take consistent backups our entire system, and then verify the backup is correct
• Improving our Continuous Deployment pipeline
• DevSecOps

Technologies: Clojure, AWS, Kafka, Datomic, Kubernetes.

Requirements

• Experience in Clojure or another functional language
• 4+ years experience in SRE/DevOps
• Strong understanding of IP networking
• Experience with AWS
• Experience with Docker
• A desire to work with small teams in fast-paced start-up environments.

Operational experience with Kafka, Datomic, Kubernetes preferred, but not required

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 currently able to support remote employees based in: Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Portugal.