STAFF ENGINEER – DIGITAL LENDING

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower ambitious businesses and the communities they serve. Since 2015, we have lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers—all while driving economic growth in the markets we serve.

The Role

• As a Staff Engineer you’ll work with product and engineering across multiple squads to ensure the right trade‑offs are being made and that dependencies and communication is managed effectively.
• Lead squads to sensible architectural decisions on the most complex technical problems.
• 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.
• Embrace DevOps culture: you build it, you run it.
• Work well cross‑functionally and earn trust from co‑workers at all levels.
• Prefer simple solutions and designs over complex ones.
• Enjoy working with a diverse group of people with different areas of expertise.
• You challenge the existing approach when you see potential risks, but also get on board once the options have been debated and the team has made a decision.
• You are comfortably organised amongst chaos.
• You are a broad thinker and have the capability to see the potential impact of decisions across the wider business.
• Utilise Generative AI: leverage GenAI tools to increase productivity and enhance decision‑making processes within the role.

Nice To Have Skills

• Experience with AI/LLM integrations and Generative AI applications
• Knowledge of intelligent document processing and NLP techniques
• Familiarity with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate) and search platforms (e.g., OpenSearch, Elasticsearch)
• Exposure to agentic workflows or orchestration frameworks for multi‑step AI reasoning, familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol), and frameworks like Claude Code

Tech Stack

• 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

• Collaborate – We work in cross‑functional, mission‑driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to share experience and knowledge.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs – Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focus on that goal to help us understand success.
• Practice continuous improvement – We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume future needs and introduce unnecessary complexity. This means we learn faster and share learnings in blame‑free formats.
• 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 them directly and regularly.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment – Seamless delivery of changes into an environment without manual intervention is essential for us to stay highly productive. We consider resiliency and practise 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 role, leads delivery from start to finish.
• Be cloud native – We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently. Wherever SaaS tools achieve more productivity and higher quality at a lower cost, we use them to automate low‑value tasks.

How We Expect You To Behave

• We embrace difference and allow everyone to be themselves at work, fostering a happy, engaged, and collaborative environment.
• We aim for a wide range of voices to be heard for every benefit.
• We create a space for teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and who can collaborate freely.
• We provide a safe space for opinions and questions.
• No egos – people listen and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely.

What Makes Working Here Better

• This is a truly hybrid role, offering flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities for in‑person collaboration when it adds value. There is no fixed requirement for days in the office; we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully.
• Work‑life balance – 25 days holiday plus bank holidays each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary.
• Good kit – choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials – opportunities to get to know each other outside of work.
• Commuter support – we offer a cycle‑to‑work and EV scheme.

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