Monzo

Just to flag before I start: Most of the negative reviews seem to be from COps, which is honestly like a different world to the rest of the bank (they even have separate people teams and policies etc) - take from that what you will, and if you're an engineer you don't need to worry about them:

• Honestly one of the nicest internal cultures I've ever had, always a cool person to talk to about something interesting, I distinctly remember spending over an hour talking to an engineer out of the blue about some things when we just happened to be in the same part of the building
• Problems are pretty cool, nothing really "at planet scale" but at enough scale where it still matters (millions of customers etc)
• Lots of freedom, I was never, ever required to work on a specific thing, they trust engineers to use their best judgement
• Surprisingly little bureaucracy for a bank, I made some changes to production on the side to improve things I cared about and all I had to do was get the PR approved in GitHub

• Pay isn't great and is a huge point of contention internally (L3 caps out at about £100k a year), and you should not expect to get even close to Google or Apple packages. The stock is pretty poor, and you can expect to receive less than 100k of stock in your 4 year grant.

You spend millions and millions on public cloud but get really tight when it comes to paying people what they're worth. You're optimizing in the wrong place, if you want to be tight on costs, be tight on the public cloud bills which are gigantic and unoptimized, not people's salaries in one of the hottest markets ever.

If you don't move in a gigantic way on pay good engineers will make that choice for you by moving (as you've already started to see), and I really don't want to see that spiral into a Dead Sea Effect, please make the right choice even if it looks nasty on a balance sheet.