Infrastructure Engineer - Griffin

About Griffin

Griffin is 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 delivering amazing customer experiences.

We’ve grown rapidly since our launch in 2024, providing the banking backbone behind products in remittance, payroll, wealth, insurance, proptech, payments, neobanking, and more. We are expanding into card issuing, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic finance next.

Our Culture

We believe that smart, motivated, conscientious people thrive in high-trust, high-autonomy environments. We've been remote-first since we were established in 2017. Work here is asynchronous and fully flexible—because we want to be a part of your life in a way that helps you get the most out of both your work and home life.

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, tooling, and automation that help us run a highly resilient and reliable platform.

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 over cleverness, observability over hope, and scalability over premature optimization.

The Opportunity

Day to day, you'll manage the infrastructure the bank runs on—both in the cloud (AWS) and on our own hardware in third-party data centres. This includes running FoundationDB clusters, 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 core focus: replica clusters, multi-region failover, and chaos engineering to test system resilience. Security access, CircleCI pipelines, DataDog integration, and cloud spend management also fall under our team's scope.

Current Roadmap Items:

• Building out self-hosted infrastructure to support a hybrid-cloud setup and remove single-vendor reliance
• Improving Kubernetes scaling and build farm performance
• Building out PKI infrastructure
• Creating a global HTTP routing layer for seamless failover between sites

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

What You'll Own

• Infrastructure Architecture: Decisions on how we structure our systems, which approaches we take, and the tools we build.
• Production Reliability: Keeping the database, compute platform, build farm, and deployment pipelines running smoothly.
• Engineering Platform: Maintaining CI/CD, security access control, and monitoring integrations that allow engineers to deploy safely.
• Cost Efficiency: Managing spend and resource usage across AWS and DataDog.

Background & Qualifications

• Systems Experience: Experience running container orchestration in production, writing infrastructure as code, and deep understanding of IP networking.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Proven background building and managing production environments at scale (networking, compute, identity management).
• Programming Fundamentals: Ability to write clean code to solve infrastructure problems (TypeScript, Python, Go, or functional languages). Comfort picking up new languages is essential.
• Startup Mindset: Comfortable in high-autonomy environments with small teams and shifting priorities.

Note: Much of our internal tooling is written in Clojure. Prior Clojure experience is not required, but you must be willing to learn it.

What We Offer

• Remote-First Flexibility: Work from anywhere in the UK (with optional access to our Moorgate office in London).
• Work from Abroad: Up to 20 days per year.
• Time Off: 25 days’ annual leave, public bank holidays, plus a holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year.
• Equity: Share options package.
• Pension: Auto-enrolment into our Penfold pension scheme.
• Health & Wellbeing: Private medical cover with Bupa (including family cover), life insurance with AIG, and 1:1 coaching/therapy sessions via Oliva.
• Family Leave: Enhanced parental leave (up to 6 months full pay after two years of service).
• AI & Tools: Paid Claude subscription and premium tool access.
• Workplace Setup: Home office budget and support for creating an effective WFH setup.