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 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:
We have six Product Engineering teams: Banking, Infrastructure, Onboarding FinCrime, Payments, Platform, and Tooling. 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
What will you be doing here?
As a backend engineer you'll be responsible for building out one of our core product pillars, which handle core banking, compliance, accounts, and transactions. As a Bank with an integrated BaaS platform, 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.
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 (Kafka, Kube, AWS, Dataomic).
Relevant domain experience in payments or core banking systems.
Experience working 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 + winter break (we close in between Christmas and New Year) + bank holidays
Remote-first flexibility - work from anywhere in the UK
Support with home office setup
Share options - so you own a piece of what we’re building
1:1 coaching and therapy through Oliva
Auto-enrolment into company pension scheme with Penfold
Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months at full pay
Private medical insurance and life insurance (provided by Vitality and AIG respectively)
As a bank, we’re committed to maintaining the highest standards of security. This means that the successful candidate will need to complete background screening, and our offer will be conditional upon satisfactory review of these checks. This would include verification of right to work, criminal record, credit history, social media and professional reference checks.
How long will the process take?
We aim to move as fast as possible, but it normally takes us about 2-3 weeks to get to know to each other.
Step 1: An initial phone call with our Talent Team for us to tell you more about Griffin and learn about your recent experience.
Step 2: Deep dive into your professional experience, software engineering craftsmanship, collaboration skills, and mindset, with one of our engineering leaders.
Step 3: Take home task looking at your writing and coding in Clojure.
Step 4: Discussion around deep technical topics with peers, system design skills, and knowledge of APIs.
Step 5: Griffin culture interview with Grifflings outside of the Engineering Guild, and an opportunity to meet one of our founders.
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 what happens next.
We’re remote-first
We have a small London office in Moorgate, but we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About a third of the company is based within occasional commuting distance of London, the rest are full-time remote.
Under representation
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.
