The Role
As a Staff Engineer, you'll lead technical initiatives for Zopa's PoS products, collaborating with teams, mentoring engineers, and defining technical strategies.
Summary Generated by Built In
Our Story
Hello there. We’re Zopa.
We started our journey back in 2005, building the first ever peer-to-peer lending company. Fast forward to 2020 and we launched Zopa Bank. A bank that listens to what our customers don’t like about finance and does the opposite. We’re redefining what it feels like to work in finance. Our vision for a new era of banking puts people front and centre — we’ve built a business that empowers everyone to aim high, every day, to move finance forward. Find out more about our fantastic offerings at Zopa.com!
We’re incredibly proud of our achievements and none of it would be possible without the amazing team here. It’s not just industry awards we’re winning, we’ve also been named in the top three UK’s Most Loved Workplaces.
If you embrace unconventional challenges, are unafraid to think differently and are driven to make an outsized impact, you’ll thrive here at Zopa, so join us, and make it count. Want to see us in action? Follow us on Instagram @zopalife
The team:
We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to help shape the future of our Point of Sale (PoS) products — a core domain at Zopa that connects customers with fair, transparent finance at the checkout. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a hands-on technical leadership role across multiple squads. You’ll own the technical strategy for PoS, enabling us to scale our systems and grow our impact. From backend Kotlin services to React frontends, you’ll help drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and ensure we’re building things the right way.
This is a unique opportunity to help shape technical culture and capability as we scale up in Manchester.
Why join Zopa Manchester?
We’re building a new tech hub right in the heart of the city — with real backing, big ambition and the support of an established, award-winning company. You’ll help define the technical strategy in a business-critical new engineering chapter in Manchester, and help shape how we grow and build the team from day one.
You’ll work in a product-focused environment where engineers own their work end-to-end, deploy to production frequently, and see the real-world impact of what they build. You’ll also get to work with a modern tech stack: Kotlin, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Aurora Postgres and more.
We work hybrid, with at least 2 days a week together in our Manchester office.
A day in the life:
- Owning and evolving the technical vision for our Point-of-Sale systems
- Working across teams to drive consistency, scalability and architectural alignment
- Getting hands-on with code (Kotlin & React) when needed, and enabling others to thrive
- Championing engineering best practices - from testing and CI/CD to observability and performance
- Supporting engineers with mentorship, pairing and design guidance
- Collaborating closely with product managers, designers and other engineering leads
- Helping define standards for service architecture, frontend quality, and integration patterns
- Shaping the technical bar and culture of our Manchester engineering hub
About you:
- You’ve led large-scale technical initiatives across multiple teams or domains
- You’re a strong Kotlin or Java engineer with experience in modern backend systems
- You’ve worked with React or modern JS frameworks on customer-facing UIs
- You love working across boundaries — connecting dots between teams, codebases, and roadmaps
- You’re comfortable with ambiguity and thrive in fast-moving, scaling environments
- You bring others with you — explaining technical ideas clearly to both engineers and non-engineers
- You care about building inclusive teams, scalable systems, and great customer experiences
#LI-CW1
At Zopa we value flexible ways of working.
We value face-to-face collaboration and a good work-life balance. This hybrid role requires you to come to our Manchester office 2-3 days a week. (WeWork, Dalton Place, 29 John Dalton Street, M2 6WF.)
You'll also have the option of working from abroad for up to 120 days a year!* But no matter where you are, we’ll make sure you’ve got everything you need to thrive, both in your work and home life, from day one.
*Subject to having the right to work in the country of choice
Diversity Statement
Zopa is proud to offer a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds leads to better products for our customers and a unique company culture for our people. We are made up of nearly 50 nationalities, have a DE&I forum made up of Zopians wanting to make a difference and we are proud of our culture where everyone can bring their full self to work. Our approach to DE&I is reflected in our hiring process so please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments.
Top Skills
Aurora Postgres
AWS
Docker
Kafka
Kotlin
Kubernetes
React
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The Company
What We Do
We’re Zopa, and we want to make money work better for you. Our diverse team is united in their mission of creating simple, fair and honest financial products that have the customer’s needs at their heart. We’re proud that this dedication is reflected in our excellent rating on TrustPilot. We’ve always been unapologetically honest with our customers, and value the same in return. Their feedback helps us shape what we build, so we can provide a bank fit for today, and for the future. We’re not the new kids on the block though - we’ve been a pioneering force in finance for 16 years. In 2005, we built the first ever peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company, giving our customers access to loans built for real-life and intelligent investments backed by cutting-edge tech. In 2020, we launched Zopa Bank, meaning we could offer more – like fixed term savings backed by FSCS protection and a credit card to help customers take control of their finances. We’ve lent out over £6 billion and are proud to have made money work better for over half a million people across the UK, whether they were looking to borrow or save.
