At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, Since 2015, we’ve lent over $21bn across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while operating in one of the most highly regulated environments in financial services.
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 Staff Engineer, you’ll work with product and engineering across multiple squads to ensure the right technical and business trade-offs are made, dependencies are managed proactively, and execution remains predictable. Staff Engineers are among the most visible engineers in the organisation: they demonstrate technical excellence and our cultural values, influence decisions across squads, and raise the engineering bar through guidance, systems thinking, and hands-on contribution.
Staff Engineers are not people managers by default, but they lead through influence, clarity, and technical credibility.
Drive cross-squad technical outcomes: shape solutions for ambiguous, complex problems and guide squads toward sensible architectural decisions.
Own technical decision-making mechanisms: write and steward RFCs/ADRs, run design reviews, document trade-offs, and ensure decisions are understood and adopted.
Manage dependencies and execution risks: map dependencies, surface risks early, propose mitigation options, and keep stakeholders aligned as plans evolve.
Communicate proactively and clearly: provide regular written updates on progress, risks, and changes in outlook; maintain a shared source of truth for key initiatives.
Measure success by business impact: optimise for customer outcomes, reliability, and sustainable delivery—not lines of code.
Raise quality and engineering standards: set expectations for code health, testing strategy, performance, resiliency, and production readiness across squads.
Embrace DevOps culture (“you build it, you run it”): improve operability, observability, incident response, and root-cause elimination; reduce operational toil and repeat issues.
Build secure and resilient systems by design: partner early with Cyber/Risk to embed security and compliance considerations into architecture and delivery.
Multiply others: coach and mentor engineers, help leads level up planning and technical direction, and grow decision-making depth across the org.
Continuously improve platforms and developer experience: reduce duplication, strengthen shared abstractions, and improve tooling to enable faster, safer delivery across teams.
Required experience and qualities
Strong technical background with 12+ years designing and engineering large-scale systems.
Proven ability to lead architectural decisions on complex systems with multiple stakeholders and constraints.
Strong judgement: prefer simple, maintainable solutions over unnecessary complexity.
Comfortable operating in ambiguity and organised amidst chaos—can bring clarity and structure when things are messy.
Excellent collaboration and stakeholder management; able to earn trust across levels and functions.
Broad systems thinker with the ability to anticipate downstream impacts across the wider business and technology ecosystem.
Willing to challenge constructively, debate options, and then commit to the chosen path (“disagree and commit”).
Technology 🧱
We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use at the moment:
🗃 Python
🗄️ PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
🎨 TypeScript, React, styled-components
🔧 Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
☁️ 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 optimise 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 difference 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 😍
Equity. We want people to have a stake in the business so that all our interests are aligned.
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.
