Head of Engineering

Payments, Money Movement, Interest & Fees

• Provide senior technical leadership across systems that support payments, money movement, interest, and fees. These systems underpin critical flows across the Moneybox platform, including:
  • Interest calculations
  • Fee collection
  • Direct Debits
  • Faster Payments
  • Supplier integrations (e.g., Starling, HSBC, Plaid).
• Help ensure these systems remain correct, resilient, scalable, auditable, and easy to evolve as:
  • Customer volumes increase
  • Product complexity grows
  • Regulatory expectations evolve.
• Shape the long-term technical roadmap for these areas, ensuring:
  • Safe support of new products
  • Faster payments
  • Improved reconciliation
  • Clearer auditability
  • Stronger operational controls.

Architecture & Engineering Standards

• Champion simple, pragmatic architecture. Our approach:
  • Operates a monolithic architecture
  • Scales by adding new monoliths rather than defaulting to microservices.
• Designs should be as simple as possible, but never simpler to achieve:
  • Easy-to-understand systems
  • Easy-to-extend systems
  • Increase engineering velocity without unnecessary complexity
• Create and maintain engineering standards that help teams build reliable, maintainable, and operable systems without unnecessary process.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead and develop a small team of squad leads, each responsible for managing engineers while remaining hands-on in delivery.
• Coach on technical judgement, delivery ownership, people leadership, and communication.
• Create a high-trust, low-overhead operating model focused on:
  • Building high-quality software
  • Ensuring engineers are trusted, accountable, and focused on meaningful outcomes.
• Ensure line management remains focused on delivery and avoid bureaucratic overhead.

Cross-functional Influence

• Confidently represent engineering in discussions with:
  • Product
  • Compliance
  • Finance
  • Operations
  • Customer Support
  • Data
  • Information Security
  • Other departments.
• Work as a peer, not a mere executor of requirements. Help:
  • Shape solutions
  • Challenge assumptions
  • Explain trade-offs
  • Ensure engineering involvement early in key business decisions, especially around payments, money movement, interest, and fees.

Experience & Skills

Essential

• Proven experience in a senior engineering leadership role, ideally in a scale-up or high-growth technology business.
• Strong hands-on software engineering background, with:
  • Experience designing, building, releasing, and operating critical production systems.
• Strong ability to design scalable, reliable, auditable, and maintainable backend services.
• Experience with messaging, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Excellent judgement around technical trade-offs, risk, and simplicity.
• Ability to operate in regulated or high-accountability environments where:
  • Quality, auditability, and operational discipline matter.
• Experience owning systems where:
  • Correctness, reconciliation, traceability, and operational controls are business-critical.
• Ability to participate confidently in:
  • Technical discussions
  • Commercial discussions.
• Strong communication skills to explain technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Track record of delivering important engineering work through:
  • Simple, pragmatic technical decisions, rather than:
    • Excessive process
    • Over-engineered architectures.

Desirable

• Experience leading engineering managers, squad leads, or senior engineers who manage or lead other engineers.
• Experience with C#, .NET, and Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with:
  • Payments
  • Ledgers
  • Reconciliation
  • Interest calculations
  • Fee systems
  • Other financial platform domains.
• Experience working with modular monolithic architectures at scale.
• Exposure to pragmatic Domain-Driven Design.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or another regulated industry.

What Good Looks Like

When you succeed in this role:

• You raise the quality of technical decision-making across the department.
• Moneybox has strong technical leadership across:
  • Payments
  • Money movement
  • Interest
  • Fees.
• Squad leads become:
  • More effective
  • More accountable
  • More confident.
• Engineering is involved early in business and product decisions, rather than being treated as a delivery function.
• Teams deliver important work quickly without:
  • Creating unnecessary complexity.
• Systems become:
  • Easier to build on
  • Easier to operate
  • More audit-friendly
  • More understandable.
• Payments, money movement, interest, and fee systems scale safely as:
  • Customer numbers increase
  • Product complexity grows
  • Transaction volumes rise.
• You earn trust from both:
  • Engineers (due to technical depth)
  • The wider business (due to being pragmatic, clear, and delivery-focused).