Infrastructure Engineer

About Griffin

Hi, we’re Griffin. We’re a fully regulated UK bank that powers the accounts and payments offerings of product-led fintechs and platforms like Uber, Yonder, Prosper, and Sidekick. By doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, our customers can focus on what they do best - delivering amazing customer experiences.

We’ve grown rapidly since our launch in 2024, and today provide the banking backbone behind products in remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking and more.

We’re moving into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance next as we continue to support the next generation of product-led companies.

Learn more about what we do

Our culture

We believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments and have done our best to create such an environment at Griffin. People who thrive here don’t require much hand-holding, and go out of their way to figure out how to contribute in the most valuable way possible.

We've been remote-first since we were established in 2017 and we remain so today. Work here is asynchronous and fully flexible - because we want to be a part of your life in a way that helps you to get the most out of both your work and home life.

We understand that our culture and ways of working aren’t for everyone, and we’re very intentional about our hiring process as a result. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.

Our strong culture has helped us to remain a mission-driven company as we have scaled, and gives our people a clear, explicit operating framework and the space to focus on delivering real value for our customers.

Learn more about our culture.

The team:

Infrastructure sits within the Craft function. We’re a small team of three - two engineers and an engineering manager - who work closely with our CTO and Founder, Allen Rohner. It’s our job to build the foundations that everything else at Griffin runs on: the systems, the tooling, the automation that helps us run a highly resilient and reliable platform and lets other teams ship fast.

When we start work, we explore multiple solutions before picking one. We write RFCs, build proof-of-concepts, and run experiments to validate approaches. Once we commit to building something, we care about maintainability more than cleverness, observability more than hoping it works, and scalability over premature optimisation. We take the necessary time to ship quality solutions rather than hitting arbitrary deadlines. Once something goes live, we refactor the rough edges rather than polish what's already working.

The opportunity:

Day to day, you'll manage the infrastructure the bank runs on - both in the cloud and on our own hardware in third party data centres. This means running FoundationDB clusters and building tooling for hitless upgrades, managing Kubernetes, writing infrastructure as code in Pulumi and CDK, running the Bazel build farm, and owning the deployment pipeline from CI to production.

Operational resilience is a big part of the job: replica clusters, multi-region failover, and chaos engineering to test how systems handle failures. Security access, CircleCI pipelines, DataDog integration, and cloud spend all fall under infrastructure too.

On our roadmap currently is: building out our self-hosted infrastructure to support a hybrid-cloud setup and remove single-vendor reliance, improving how Kubernetes scales, improving the build farm, and building out our PKI infrastructure. We also have plans for a global HTTP routing layer to allow seamless failover between sites.

Our infrastructure as code is written in TypeScript. Where it makes sense, tooling gets written in Clojure. There's some Rust too.

What success looks like:

Infrastructure problems become production problems fast. Success here means thinking ahead - identifying issues with scale, security, or compliance before they affect services.

You've eliminated an entire class of incidents by fixing the underlying architectural issue. You've proven the database and compute platform can handle 10x current traffic volumes by working with backend teams to stress-test it. You've cut deploy times in half by rethinking how the pipeline works. You've tested multi-region failover under realistic failure scenarios and it worked. You've redesigned service discovery to remove networking issues that used to cause weekly firefights. When new FCA requirements dropped, you were already compliant because you'd built the infrastructure to handle it months earlier.

To do this, you'll own:

• Infrastructure architecture decisions - how we structure our systems, what approaches we take, what tools we build

• Production reliability - keeping the database, compute, build farm, and deployment pipelines running and improving them

• What other teams depend on to ship - CI/CD, security access, monitoring integration, and the infrastructure that lets engineers deploy safely

• Infrastructure cost and efficiency - managing spend and resource usage across AWS and DataDog
  

Stack: FoundationDB, Kubernetes, Bazel, Pulumi, CDK, CircleCI, DataDog, Clojure, TypeScript

Your background:

You'll fit in well here if you have:

• Solid systems experience - you've run container orchestration in production, written infrastructure as code, and understand IP networking well enough to debug it when things go wrong

• Cloud infrastructure experience - you've built and managed production environments, worked with networking, identity management, and compute at scale

• Programming fundamentals - you write code to solve problems. TypeScript, Python, Go, or functional languages are all fine. If your experience only extends to Bash scripting and YAML, we probably aren't a good fit for you.

• Comfort with startup environments - small teams, shifting priorities, high autonomy

We write a lot of our tooling in Clojure - our database control plane, operational scripts, and automation. You don't need Clojure experience coming in, but you'll need to learn it once you're here. If you've worked with functional languages before, that helps.

Regardless, you should be comfortable picking up new languages and approaches as we do find ourselves reading through the codebases of open-source systems and tools we use to understand their behaviour, and they are written in a diverse range of languages we don't use ourselves.

What can we offer you?

We are an early stage startup and we're working hard to expand our benefits package. We're planning to add to this list in the future.

• Remote-first flexibility: Work from anywhere in the UK

• Work from abroad: Up to 20 days a year

• Time off: 25 days’ holiday, bank holidays and a winter break (we shut down between Christmas and New Year)

• Share options: Own a part of what we’re building together

• Pension: Auto-enrolment into our Penfold scheme

• Insurance: Private medical with Bupa (including family cover) and life insurance with AIG

• Wellbeing: 1:1 coaching and therapy session available through Oliva

• Family leave: Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months on full pay after two years’ service

• AI tools: Everyone has a Claude subscription on us and access to other premium tools

• Your setup: We’ll support you in creating a comfortable and effective WFH environment.

As a bank, we’re committed to maintaining the highest standards of security. This means that the successful candidate will need to complete background screening, and our offer will be conditional upon satisfactory review of these checks. This would include verification of right to work, criminal record, credit history, social media and professional reference checks.

How do I apply?

Are we your next move? Apply via the link below, if there's a match our Talent team will reach out to schedule an initial conversation and talk you through what happens next.

We’re remote-first

We trust people to do great work wherever they are. We hire across the UK and most of our team works remotely full-time. We have a small London office in Moorgate for those who want it, and about a third of the company is close enough to use it occasionally, but there's no expectation to be there. What matters is the work, not where you do it.

Under representation

At Griffin, we’re looking for people who instinctively vibe with our values, behaviours and mission. You’re encouraged to apply, even if your experience doesn’t tick every box. Careers, like life, can take many twists and turns. Your technical expertise and path to where you are today will stand out. We're committed to creating a place where everyone belongs and we welcome diverse perspectives, backgrounds and people who are ready to build a global platform for programmable finance

Griffin Bank Ltd request that recruitment agencies do not speculatively submit CVs to any employee or associate of our company unless explicitly asked to do so by a member of our Talent team.

Any CVs sent to any member of our team on a speculative basis will not be recognised and we will not accept liability for any fee or commission should we subsequently employ a candidate who applied to us directly or was introduced by an instructed agency that may also have been submitted speculatively by an uninstructed agency.