Infrastructure Engineer at Griffin (UK Fintech Bank)

About Griffin: Griffin is a fully regulated UK bank powering accounts and payments for product-led fintechs like Uber, Yonder, Prosper, and Sidekick. Since launching in 2024, Griffin has rapidly grown to support remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking, and more. The company is expanding into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance.

Griffin operates in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment, remote-first since 2017, with asynchronous and fully flexible work policies. The company prioritizes mission-driven growth and a culture that empowers employees to deliver real value.

The Team:

The Infrastructure team consists of three members—two engineers and an engineering manager—who collaborate closely with the CTO and Founder. Their role is to build foundational systems, tooling, and automation that ensure Griffin’s platform is highly resilient, reliable, and scalable. The team emphasizes maintainability, observability, and scalability over premature optimization.

Key responsibilities include:

• Exploring and validating multiple solutions before committing to one (e.g., writing RFCs, building proof-of-concepts).
• Managing FoundationDB clusters, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi/CDK).
• Running the Bazel build farm and owning the deployment pipeline from CI to production.
• Ensuring operational resilience through replica clusters, multi-region failover, and chaos engineering.
• Overseeing security access, CircleCI pipelines, DataDog integration, and cloud spend.

Current roadmap includes:

• Building a hybrid-cloud setup to reduce single-vendor reliance.
• Improving Kubernetes scalability and the build farm.
• Expanding PKI infrastructure and implementing a global HTTP routing layer for seamless failover.

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

The Opportunity:

Daily tasks involve managing cloud and on-premise infrastructure, including:

• Running FoundationDB clusters and building tooling for hitless upgrades.
• Managing Kubernetes environments and writing infrastructure-as-code.
• Operational resilience efforts like replica clusters, multi-region failover, and chaos engineering.
• Security access, CircleCI pipelines, DataDog monitoring, and cloud cost management.

Success is measured by:

• Proactively identifying and resolving scale, security, or compliance issues before they impact services.
• Eliminating recurring incidents by addressing root architectural problems.
• Optimizing deployment pipelines and stress-testing systems to handle increased traffic.
• Ensuring multi-region failover works under realistic failure scenarios.
• Redesigning service discovery to mitigate networking issues.
• Anticipating and complying with regulatory requirements (e.g., FCA) before they become mandatory.

Ownership:

• Infrastructure architecture decisions, including system structure, tooling, and approaches.

• Production reliability for databases, compute, build farms, and deployment pipelines.

• CI/CD, security access, monitoring integration, and safe deployment infrastructure for other teams.

• Infrastructure cost and efficiency across AWS and DataDog.

What Success Looks Like:

Infrastructure problems escalate quickly. Success is defined by:

• Thinking ahead to prevent scale, security, or compliance issues.
• Eliminating incident classes by fixing foundational problems.
• Proving systems can handle 10x current traffic volumes through stress-testing.
• Halving deploy times by rethinking pipeline workflows.
• Validating multi-region failover under realistic failure conditions.
• Redesigning service discovery to resolve recurring networking issues.
• Ensuring compliance with new regulations (e.g., FCA) before they take effect.

Your Background:

Ideal candidates have:

• Solid systems experience: Experience running container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) in production, writing infrastructure-as-code, and debugging IP networking.

• Cloud infrastructure experience: Building and managing production environments, including networking, identity management, and compute at scale.

• Programming fundamentals: Ability to write code in languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, or functional languages (e.g., Clojure). Bash scripting and YAML alone are insufficient.

• Startup comfort: Experience with small teams, shifting priorities, and high autonomy.

While Clojure experience is helpful, it’s not required. The team expects candidates to learn it quickly. Familiarity with functional languages is a plus.

Candidates should be comfortable learning new languages and tools, as the team frequently reviews open-source systems written in diverse languages.

What We Offer:

• Remote-first flexibility: Work from anywhere in the UK.
• Work from abroad: Up to 20 days per year.
• Time off: 25 days’ holiday, bank holidays, and a winter break (shutdown between Christmas and New Year).
• Share options: Ownership in Griffin’s growth.
• Pension: Auto-enrolment into Penfold scheme.
• Insurance: Private medical coverage (Bupa, including family) and life insurance (AIG).
• Wellbeing: Access to 1:1 coaching and therapy via Oliva.
• Family leave: Enhanced parental leave with up to 6 months on full pay after two years of service.
• AI tools: Claude subscriptions and premium tool access for all employees.
• Setup support: Assistance in creating a comfortable and effective work-from-home environment.

Security:

As a bank, Griffin requires background screening for all successful candidates. This includes verification of right-to-work status, criminal record checks, credit history, social media review, and professional references. Offers are contingent on satisfactory completion of these checks.