Griffin
Hi, we’re Griffin! We’re the bank for companies who want to build and launch financial products.
We're rapidly heading towards a future where most of us access financial services through technology companies rather than high street banks. All sorts of companies are now embedding financial products into their apps and user journeys so that their customers can seamlessly make payments, manage expenses, take out loans, save, invest, and do more.
The problem is that companies are still dependent on legacy banking infrastructure if they want to offer regulated financial products. They need to either partner directly with an incumbent bank and/or stitch together middleware from various Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers. This process is slow, expensive, and complex and makes it very hard for companies to get new financial products off the ground.
At Griffin, we want to change this.
We want to make it easy for companies to bring finance to their customers at the point of greatest relevance. So, we built a bank.
But not just any bank! Griffin is a technology platform and a bank: fully regulated, API-first, developer-centric, and purpose-built to serve innovative fintechs and brands who want to build and embed financial products.
Our culture is our most important asset, and one of the ways we safeguard it is by being extremely intentional about hiring the right people. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.
We also believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments. That’s why we’re transparent by default, and we encourage open discussion and challenge across all levels of the organisation. We’re also remote-first, asynchronous, and fully flexible - because you're the expert on how and when you do your best work.
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.
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 rapid 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.
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.
Stack: FoundationDB, Kubernetes, Bazel, Pulumi, CDK, CircleCI, DataDog, Clojure
You'll fit in well here if you have:
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.
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.
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.
We have a small London office in Moorgate, but we are comfortable hiring people to work from anywhere in the UK. About a third of the company is based within occasional commuting distance of London, the rest are full-time remote.
Our goal is for Griffin to proportionally represent the diversity of the working population in society. We’re working to ensure that Griffin is a supportive, empowering and inclusive environment for every member of our team — whatever your combination of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, nationality, neurodiversity, and religious beliefs. If you’re part of a group that is under-represented in fintech, we’d love to hear from you.
