Director, Engineering
We are building a bank for the "missing middle," the underserved businesses that are too big for neobanks to serve and not yet large enough to get any quality of service from the incumbent banks. We have built a successful lending business that has funded over 28,000 new homes and created over 55,000 jobs. Our goal is to be THE financial partner for our customers, servicing all their financial needs. In October, we launched business savings accounts as the first step on our roadmap. We are in the early stage of building a full stack bank with plenty of challenges to solve; curious, collaborative, and creative leaders are needed to help us along the way.
The role- We're looking for a global Engineering leader who can build, nurture, and scale high-performing teams that achieve business objectives and customer outcomes. Essential to the role is an orientation around our customers (SMEs in the UK and US) - you should be excited by building technology that delivers to customer needs, solves customer problems, builds customer delight, and affinity to OakNorth.
- You will report to our London-based CTO and be part of a Senior Engineering leadership team spanning multiple geographies, time zones, customer segments, and business propositions. You will be creating new digital experiences for our customers, but this is not a green field project, so legacy systems, team transformation, and systems migration will be a significant part of this role. Ideally, you will have led significant and complex transformations before, have the learnings and scars to show for it, and be excited to lead a team to see the benefits on the other side.
- As a Director of Engineering, you will be responsible for removing roadblocks, ensuring processes are lean, efficient, and helping develop members of your team by teaching them the necessary skills to grow their career.
- Create a culture of transparency and collaboration, lead by example in a flat organisational structure.
- Have a strong technical background, including 10+ years of experience designing and engineering large scale systems, preferably including fintech or challenger/neobank environments.
- You have worked in startups, built and launched products, scaled teams, and have a strong understanding of product and commercial aspects of a business.
- Responsible for technical delivery and ensuring that the squad understands and focuses on the goal.
- Measure your success in terms of business impact, not lines of code.
- Internalise the best ideas from across the organisation, humbly setting a vision that others can get behind.
- Reinforce engineering best practices; TDD, IaC, observability, security by design, continuous improvement.
- TypeScript, React, styled-components.
- Python for any new development; there are some Java components gradually being phased out.
- PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL.
- Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest.
- AWS for transactional workloads, GCP for data workloads.
- Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, GitHub, GitHub Actions.
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.
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