Infrastructure Engineer

About Griffin
Hi, we’re Griffin. We’re a fully regulated UK bank that powers the accounts and payments offerings of product-led fintechs and platforms like Uber, Yonder, Prosper, and Sidekick. By doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, our customers can focus on what they do best - delivering amazing customer experiences.
We’ve grown rapidly since our launch in 2024, and today provide the banking backbone behind products in remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking and more.
We’re moving into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance next as we continue to support the next generation of product-led companies.
Learn more about what we do

Our culture
We believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments and have done our best to create such an environment at Griffin. People who thrive here don’t require much hand-holding, and go out of their way to figure out how to contribute in the most valuable way possible.
We've been remote-first since we were established in 2017 and we remain so today. Work here is asynchronous and fully flexible - because we want to be a part of your life in a way that helps you to get the most out of both your work and home life.
We understand that our culture and ways of working aren’t for everyone, and we’re very intentional about our hiring process as a result. We won't hire people who don’t seem like a strong fit for our core values, even if they're otherwise extremely qualified.
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.

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 . 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…

Source: Arbeitnow (https://www.arbeitnow.co.uk/jobs/companies/griffin/infrastructure-engineer-london-356073)