Principal Software Engineer
London /
Engineering – Current Accounts Engineering /
Employee - Permanent
/ Hybrid
Our Story
Hello there. We’re Zopa.
We began our journey in 2005 with the drive to deliver customer-first financial products. Fast forward to 2020, we shifted gears and became a digital bank, leveraging our customer knowledge, money expertise and technical agility to forge ahead. Our diverse team is united by a mission to create simple, fair and honest financial products that have the customers’ needs at their heart.
We’re regularly recognised at industry awards for our game-changing products and are proud to be one of the market leaders in consumer lending in the UK. But our work doesn’t stop there.
After securing £220 million in our 2021 funding round led by SoftBank, we’ve entered the next stage in our journey. So far, we’ve lent out over £8 billion and made money work better for over half a million people across the UK who were looking to borrow or save with us. In less than 2 years after becoming a bank, we hit £2 billion in customer deposits and we’re also a top 5 credit card issuer in the UK. And this is just the beginning.
We’re set on achieving big things with ambitious growth targets to match. This means there's a range of opportunities for you to excel and develop through a career at Zopa, while building better banking products that truly matter to our customers.
If you embrace unconventional challenges, are unafraid to think differently and are driven to make an outsized impact, you’ll thrive here at Zopa. For a closer look at our culture, check out our latest video here. And if you want to join us, have a look at our current open roles!
The team:
This is an exciting opportunity to join our new Current Accounts team. We want to transform the Current Accounts space as we have already done with loans, savings, credit cards and car finance, tying together our Zopa ecosystem, with big ambitions targeting over 1m+ active customers in 3 years' time. This role will be crucial to helping us get there so there's big opportunity for some serious career defining impact. The Current Account tribe will be split over multiple cross-functional squads, however a Principal Engineer is required to bring technical vision and alignment to the whole domain.
The tech:
Zopa uses a modern tech stack to deliver the reliability and performance that our customers expect from their bank without compromising our ability to be agile. A typical team uses technologies like Kotlin, Kafka, React, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Aurora Postgres and Jenkins.
A day in the life:
- Support, mentor and coordinate the Lead Engineers to ensure alignment within the tribe. It is not a people management role but you will be a role model for other engineers.
- Communicate with stakeholders (technical and otherwise) and bring squads closer together.
- Be involved in designing, building, iterating on, and monitoring highly available, well-tested backend services.
- Comfortable reasoning about distributed systems and designing for their pitfalls.
- Embrace eventual consistency where required but also understand when a scalable synchronous solution would be more appropriate.
- Help your team manage the trade-offs implied in shipping new products to market - balancing speed, polish and the need to learn what fits customers needs best.
- Coordinate and inspire Senior Engineers at Zopa to help define technical strategy and ensure that best practices are adopted at a company level.
- Keep up with industry trends and identify use cases at Zopa.
About you:
- You are passionate about creating impact through empowering others and believe in supportive and humble leadership.
- You are self-driven, ambitious and results focused.
- You are passionate about technology and using it as a tool to provide great customer experiences.
- You consider quality as a first class concern and have a proven background in improving quality in previous roles.
- You have experience building, running and supporting complex systems in production.
- You take into account the long term consequences of the choices you and your team make when taking decisions and try to anticipate future problems.
- You enjoy owning and solving problems. You can create structure out of ambiguity, think about problems holistically and can drive an agenda while juggling multiple demands.
- You are empathetic with strong relationship building skills and can communicate clearly and succinctly across a broad range of stakeholders throughout the software development process, managing expectations as you go.
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Flexible working? Yes please!
Whether you want to come into our open-plan, riverside London Bridge office or work from the comfort of your own home (or both!), you’ll be able to decide on an approach with your manager, looking at what works best for you, your role and your team.
Not only that – you'll also have the option of working from abroad for up to 120 days a year!* But no matter where you are, we’ll make sure you’ve got everything you need to thrive, both in your work and home life, from day one.
*Subject to having the right to work in the country of choice
To thrive here, you’ll need to:
Champion our customers. Whatever your role, you’ll be close to our customers. We care passionately about doing the best for them.
Help us make fearless choices. Our environment is fast-paced, agile and open. You’ll solve interesting and challenging problems, and be trusted and empowered to bring your ideas to life.
Walk the talk. Like us, you’ll be honest, stick to your promises and face the tough moments head-on.
Win smarter. You’ll be always on the lookout for a better way of doing things, going beyond ‘good enough’ and welcoming different points of view.
Be in it together. You’ll join an ambitious, diverse and all-round approachable team with a mix of ideas and talents who inspire each other to be better every day.
Zopa is proud to offer a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds leads to great products and unique company culture. We simply can’t expect to empower our customers to better manage their money without challenging the current status quo. Creating the best place for money is no easy task, which is why we need talent from all walks of life.
