Staff Backend Engineer
Monzo is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer in Barcelona, Spain. Level rates it ; you can apply on Monzo.
Level's read on this job
- Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: aI is not part of the work.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 71 other open roles at Monzo.
AI in this role
🚀 We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone.
We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking.
After starting as a prepaid card, our product offering has grown a lot in the last 10 years in the UK. As well as personal and business bank accounts, we offer joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more exciting things to come beyond. Our UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with us.
With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers!
We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo ❤️
📍Barcelona, Spain | 💰 Base salary for this role is depending on experience + benefits | Hybrid model: 3 days a week in the office
About our Engineering Teams:
We have over 650 engineers across Monzo who design and build our in-house banking platform. We have big ambitions for the future, and technology plays a big role in creating a bank our customers want, so engineers at Monzo collaborate across disciplines to solve interesting challenges throughout the company.
These range from the products our customers use everyday to underlying infrastructure, security, payments and finance, customer operations, financial crime, and data, to name just a few areas. As a bank, there is scope for impact across a huge number of opportunities.
We contribute to open source software as much as possible. Our blog is a good place to learn even more about what we do!
What you’ll be working on:
We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:
- Go to write our application code (there’s an excellent interactive Go tutorial here)
- Cassandra for most persistent data storage
- Kafka for our asynchronous message queue
- Envoy Proxy for RPC
- Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services
- AWS for most of our infrastructure
- React for internal web dashboards
- We also have two physical datacenter sites with actual cables to connect to various third parties
Your day-to-day
This role is all about collaborating across disciplines to test hypotheses and make a difference to customers. As a product backend engineer you’ll work in a squad alongside product managers, marketers, user researchers, designers, mobile engineers, web engineers, data analysts, business analysts, writers and more!
Together you’ll build and support a particular part of Monzo. Our product squads belong to our wider collectives (a word we use to describe self-governing business units of ~100 people). They are; Money, Borrowing, Fincrime, Customer Operations, Platform, Personal Banking & Business Banking. They’re all looking for additional Backend Engineers right now, we do a standard interview process across all our collectives and at the end we will find the best match for you based on your skills, experience, preferences and aligning with the business need!
Our backend engineers have a variety of different backgrounds. As long as you enjoy learning new things, we’d love to talk to you. We do not ask for formal qualifications or degree requirements for any of our engineering roles.
You should apply if:
- you have strong experience working on the backend of a technology product
- you want to be involved in building a product that you (and the people you know) use every day
- you have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data-informed decisions
- you’re comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity
- you’re interested in distributed systems and writing resilient software
- you have some experience with strongly-typed languages (Go, Java, C, Scala etc.).
- you think you’d enjoy the kind of work we’re doing
We're on the look out for L60 Engineers at the moment, you can read more in our Engineering Progression Framework we are also hiring on L40 & L50, our interview process will determine your levelling.
The Interview Process:
Our interview process involves three main stages:
- Initial Call
- Take home task or pair coding exercise
- Final interview including a system design and a behavioural interview
One of our engineers has written a detailed blog on their experience through this process, for extra details, hints and tips please see here.
What’s in it for you:
💰Base salary range for this role is depending on experience + equity + stock options & benefits
📍Barcelona, Spain
⏰ We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.
📚Learning budget of €1,200 a year for books, training courses and conferences
#LI-JS1
Equal opportunities for everyone
Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2026 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report.
We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.
If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage 😊
How we rate this
Staff Backend Engineer at Monzo rates 36 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
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