Monzo

Tech – Engineering on Steroids Monzo's tech stack is really good. It's modern (Cassandra, Go, microservices) but that's just a small part of what makes it so good. Monzo has invested heavily in really good engineer tooling, – as an engineer working on product features you get so much out of the box, experimentation frameworks, logging, monitoring, auto scaling all just work.

Our testing framework uses static analysis to determine which tests are relevant to a change, CI typically takes less than 2 minutes on a PR. Deploying a change is a single command and typically takes less than a minute. We deploy to production dozens of times a day.

Culture The company is arranged as a collection of squads that belong to collectives (departments composed of squads with similar focus e.g. Borrowing Collective includes squads for all lending products). These squads contain people from all the different disciplines needed to own that area, engineers, designers, product managers, user researchers, product testers etc.

A squad is then given a lot of trust and autonomy to really own the direction of a product. At Monzo you aren't just an engineer implementing changes that "management" has decided should be made, you are part of a small team that is empowered to drive the decisions about what we should do.

Transparency – the company is really transparent internally, anyone can see the month by month financial performance of the business, read the strategy docs for other parts of the business and generally just be informed about what is going on.

So much information Transparency is great but you have to be disciplined about what information you want to expose yourself to. There is so much going on that trying to keep up with everything is a full time job.

Work/Life balance You work with some excellent peers and are challenged to perform at a very high level. Sometimes you can get a little burnt out. The company is pretty good at handling this (you can take a mental health day, and that's not just something in a procedure that no one actually uses – people do take them).

Pressures of being pre-profit Monzo is not yet profitable. The company is on a really strong trajectory but need to keep that up until we reach profitability. Whilst we are pre-profit we have to work predominantly on projects that generate us value (revenue) as well as being valuable to our customers. We have to be quite restricted on the time we can spend on projects that add customer value but don't generate any revenue. We do still work on these things but for every one we work on there are 5 more we'd love to be able to ship.

Top down communication from exec team feels more "polished" than it used to, I miss the days of Tom Blomfield leading a really candid discussion on the challenges we face and how he's thinking it through.

There was a certain rawness and authenticity, you felt like you were genuinely exposed to the cutting edge of the company strategy rather than today it feels like you ingest the outcome of some discussion that's already happened.