Principal Software Engineer
Zopa
Software Engineering
London, UK
Posted on Thursday, October 26, 2023
Our Story
Hello there. We’re Zopa.
We started our journey back in 2005, building the first ever peer-to-peer lending company. Fast forward to 2020 and we launched Zopa Bank. A bank that listens to what our customers don’t like about finance and does the opposite. We’re redefining what it feels like to work in finance. Our vision for a new era of banking puts people front and centre — we’ve built a business that empowers everyone to aim high, every day, to move finance forward. Find out more about our fantastic offerings at Zopa.com!
We’re incredibly proud of our achievements and none of it would be possible without the amazing team here. It’s not just industry awards we’re winning, we’ve also been named in the top three UK’s Most Loved Workplaces.
If you embrace unconventional challenges, are unafraid to think differently and are driven to make an outsized impact, you’ll thrive here at Zopa, so join us, and make it count. Want to see us in action? Follow us on Instagram @zopalife
The team:
This is an exciting opportunity to join our fantastic Software Architecture team who work across different products and remits within the organisation. You'll work closely with our Chief Technology Officer, Chief Software Engineer and the wider team to focus and look at how we build our products. You'll be deeply embedded into driving particular products at different times, leading on the most technical difficulties in the business. You'll also help to look at providing consistency in ways of working and standardise how we do development here at Zopa.
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 across different teams. 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.
#LI-JH1
Flexible working? Yes please!
At Zopa we value flexible ways of working. We understand the benefits of face-to-face collaboration and the importance of a good work life balance. Our teams work in a hybrid manner from our open-plan, riverside London Bridge office and the comfort of their own homes at a frequency that suits the team and the work they do.
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
Diversity Statement
Zopa is proud to offer a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds leads to better products for our customers and a unique company culture for our people. We are made up of nearly 50 nationalities, have a DE&I forum made up of Zopians wanting to make a difference and we are proud of our culture where everyone can bring their full self to work. Our approach to DE&I is reflected in our hiring process so please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments.