LEAD ENGINEER

About OakNorth

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.

OakNorth is a profitable business that has supported the growth of thousands of entrepreneurs with a new standard of business lending. We're looking for people to join our Engineering team in building upon this success, as we grow to play a key part in redefining the future of business banking with next generation financial tools and products.

This is a fantastic opportunity to join a fast-paced, growing bank with a reputation for doing things differently. We don’t want another cog in the machine, we’re looking for self-starters and bold thinkers who want to pave their own career paths.

The Role

As a Lead Engineer, you will have a strong technical background with 9+ years of experience designing and engineering large-scale systems. You will possess strong experience in either backend (Python) or frontend (React) in enterprise-class applications, with a pragmatic attitude to technology and a willingness to grow into full stack over time.

• Architecture and system design knowledge, preferably in Domain-Driven Design and Event Design.
• Measure success in terms of business impact, not lines of code.
• Internalize the best ideas from across the organization, humbly setting a vision that others can get behind.
• Embrace DevOps culture: You build it, you run it.
• Work well cross-functionally and earn trust from co-workers at all levels.
• Care deeply about mentorship and growing your colleagues.
• Prefer simple solutions and designs over complex ones.
• Enjoy working with a diverse group of people with different areas of expertise.
• Challenge the existing approach when you see the cliff edge racing towards us, but also get on board once the options have been debated and the team has made a decision.
• Be comfortably organized amongst chaos.
• Be a broad thinker with the capability to see the potential impact of decisions across the wider business.
• Own the technical direction and act as the go-to architect for your area for a domain or product area, and bring engineers, PMs, and stakeholders along with you.
• Raise the engineering bar by championing design quality, reliability, observability, and security.
• Challenge over-complicated designs and push for pragmatic, evolvable solutions.
• Coach and mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, giving clear feedback and helping them grow into broader responsibilities.
• Partner closely with Product and Delivery to shape roadmaps, highlight risks early, and make sensible trade-offs between scope, risk, and timelines.
• Take ownership during incidents and tricky production problems, coordinating technical response and follow-ups, not just writing the fix.

Technology Stack

We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use at the moment:

• Languages: Python, TypeScript
• Databases: PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
• Frontend: React, styled-components
• Testing: Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
• Cloud & DevOps: AWS, GCP, ECS Fargate, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

How We Expect You To Work

We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:

• Collaborate: We work in cross-functional, mission-driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs: Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.
• Practice continuous improvement: We optimize for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame-free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.
• Seek to understand our users: We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users' needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment: Seamless delivery of changes into an environment - without manual intervention - is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.
• Test outside-in, test first: TDD keeps us confident in moving fast, and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset - writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.
• You build it, you run it: We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, has the opportunity to lead delivery of features from start to finish.
• Be cloud native: We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently. Where SaaS tools help us achieve more productivity and better-quality results for a cheap price, we use these to automate low-value tasks.

How We Expect You To Behave

We embrace differences and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:

• A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all.
• Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together.
• Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question.
• No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely.

Benefits & Perks

• Health Insurance for employee and dependents.
• Wellbeing and social events.
• Support causes that matter to you – Volunteering time off.

About Us

We’re OakNorth Bank and we embolden entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions, understand their markets, and apply data intelligence to everyday decisions to scale successfully at pace. Banking should be barrier-free. It’s a belief at our very core, inspired by our entrepreneurial spirit, driven by the unmet financial needs of millions, and delivered by our data-driven tools.

And for those who love helping businesses thrive? Our savings accounts help diversify the high street and create new jobs, all while earning savers some of the highest interest on the market. But we go beyond finance, to empower our people, encourage professional growth and create an environment where everyone can thrive. We strive to create an inclusive and diverse workplace where people can be themselves and succeed.

Our Story

OakNorth Bank was built on the foundations of frustrations with old-school banking. In 2005, when our founders tried to get capital for their data analytics company, the computer said ‘no’. Unfortunately, all major banks in the UK were using the same computer – and it was broken. Why was it so difficult for a profitable business with impressive cashflow, retained clients, and clear commercial success to get a loan? The industry was backward-looking and too focused on historic financials, rather than future potential. So, what if there was a bank, founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs? One that offered a dramatically better borrowing experience for businesses? No more what ifs, OakNorth Bank exists.

For more information regarding our Privacy Policy and practices, please visit: https://oaknorth.co.uk/legal/privacy-notice/employees-and-visitors/

Key skills/competency

• Lead Engineer
• System Design
• Architecture
• Backend Development (Python)
• Frontend Development (React)
• DevOps
• Mentorship
• Problem Solving
• Agile Methodologies
• Cloud Computing (AWS/GCP)