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. https://griffin.com/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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenrohner/. 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. We're a software engineering team as much as an infrastructure team: we write the code that runs our platform, not just the configuration around it.
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 build and 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 writing the software and 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. Much of this is software we built ourselves, and you'll shape it from the first design through to production.
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 shipped well-tested software that turns risky manual operations, like database upgrades, into routine, hitless ones that the whole team maintains with confidence.
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
Infrastructure software - the code behind our database control plane, operational tooling and automation, from design and implementation through to testing, code review and maintenance
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
Strong software engineering fundamentals - you write code to solve problems, and you're as comfortable designing, testing and reviewing production software as you are configuring infrastructure. 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: 28 days’ holiday + bank holidays
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 don’t work with recruitment agencies, so please don’t send us speculative CVs.
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
