Software Engineer

About Griffin

Hi, we’re Griffin. We’re a fully regulated UK bank that powers the accounts and payments offerings of product-led fintechs and platforms like Uber, Yonder, Prosper, and Sidekick. By doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, our customers can focus on what they do best - delivering amazing customer experiences.

We’ve grown rapidly since our launch in 2024, and today provide the banking backbone behind products in remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking and more.

We’re moving into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance next as we continue to support the next generation of product-led companies.

Learn more about what we do

Our culture

We believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments and have done our best to create such an environment at Griffin. People who thrive here don’t require much hand-holding, and go out of their way to figure out how to contribute in the most valuable way possible.

We've been remote-first since we were established in 2017 and we remain so today. Work here is asynchronous and fully flexible - because we want to be a part of your life in a way that helps you to get the most out of both your work and home life.

We understand that our culture and ways of working aren’t for everyone, and we’re very intentional about our hiring process as a result. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.

Our strong culture has helped us to remain a mission-driven company as we have scaled, and gives our people a clear, explicit operating framework and the space to focus on delivering real value for our customers.

Learn more about our culture.

The team

The Craft function has seven small, cross-functional engineering teams - each with engineers, an engineering manager, and a product manager, working closely with designers. You'll join one team that owns a product area end-to-end.

When we start work, we explore multiple solutions before picking one. You'll write RFCs, build proof-of-concepts, and run experiments to validate approaches. Once we commit to building something, we care about maintainability more than cleverness, observability more than hoping it works, and scalability more than premature optimisation. We ship quality code over hitting arbitrary deadlines. Once something goes live, we refactor the rough edges rather than polish what's already working

The opportunity

Right now, we're building card issuing from scratch, going direct on Faster Payments, enabling cross-border payments, and building term deposit accounts. Day to day, this means: writing the reconciliation systems that process millions of FPS transactions, implementing double-entry accounting that tracks card spending and settlements, designing webhook infrastructure with message signing and replay protection, building API versioning that lets us evolve without breaking customers, or creating payment approval workflows that satisfy both user experience and compliance requirements.

What success looks like

Success here is about impact beyond your own code: improving how we work, making other engineers more productive, and building systems that our customers (other developers) actually want to use. This looks like:

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redesigning the transaction reconciliation service to handle 10x throughput before we hit FPS volume limits

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fixing the root cause of webhook delivery failures so we stop getting paged at 3am

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building a Bazel rule that cuts build times in half for the whole team

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writing an RFC that becomes the pattern we use for all event-driven services

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pairing with another engineer to help them reason through FoundationDB transaction semantics

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owning card issuing from initial RFC through to processing the first live transaction - making every architecture and implementation decision along the way.

What you'll own

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The technical decisions on your projects - you'll write the RFCs, choose the architecture, and decide when to extend existing systems versus rebuild them

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Delivery from customer problem to live feature - you'll work with PMs to shape what gets built, then own getting it into production

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Setting technical direction - your code reviews, implementation patterns, and architectural choices influence how the wider team builds software

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Production responsibility - the systems you build are yours to monitor, debug, and improve when issues arise

Your background

You'll fit well here if you come from one of these backgrounds:

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Functional programming - you've shipped production Clojure, Elixir, Erlang, Haskell, Scala, or Scheme in a professional setting, or you've built substantial personal projects that demonstrate deep functional programming experience

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Fintech domain expertise - you've worked in payments, accounts, ledgers, or compliance where you've dealt with money movement, reconciliation, and regulatory requirements

Beyond that, you'll need:

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Strong software fundamentals and distributed systems knowledge - you understand consistency models, idempotency, and the failure modes that actually matter in production

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Experience working in product-focused, collaborative teams - you've shaped what gets built alongside PMs and designers, not just implemented specs

Comfort with startup pace and ambiguity - priorities shift, requirements evolve, and you adapt without needing perfect clarity upfront

What can we offer you?

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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.

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Remote-first flexibility: Work from anywhere in the UK

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Time off: 25 days’ holiday, bank holidays and a winter break (we shut down between Christmas and New Year)

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Share options: Own a part of what we’re building together

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Work from abroad: Up to 20 days a year

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Pension: Auto-enrolment into our Penfold scheme

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Insurance: Private medical with Bupa (including family cover) and life insurance with AIG

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Wellbeing: 1:1 coaching and therapy session available through Oliva

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Family leave: Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months on full pay after two years’ service

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AI tools: Everyone has a Claude subscription on us and access to other premium tools

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Your setup: We’ll support you in creating a comfortable and effective WFH environment.

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 move as fast as possible, but it normally takes us about 2-3 weeks to get to know to each other.

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Step 1: An initial phone call with our Talent Team for us to tell you more about Griffin and learn about your recent experience.

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Step 2: A task based on what you’ll be doing on a day to day at Griffin.

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Step 3: Meet your manager to talk through your experience and how that relates to the requirements.

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Step 4: Meet with peers in your team for a more in-depth technical interview.

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Step 5: Culture and Founder interview: Learn more about this here.

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 trust people to do great work wherever they are. We hire across the UK and most of our team works remotely full-time. We have a small London office in Moorgate for those who want it, and about a third of the company is close enough to use it occasionally, but there's no expectation to be there. What matters is the work, not where you do it.

Under representation

At Griffin, we’re looking for people who instinctively vibe with our values, behaviours and mission. You’re encouraged to apply, even if your experience doesn’t tick every box. Careers, like life, can take many twists and turns. Your technical expertise and path to where you are today will stand out. We're committed to creating a place where everyone belongs and we welcome diverse perspectives, backgrounds and people who are ready to build a global platform for programmable finance

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.