Staff Engineer Digital Lending

Role overview

As a Staff Engineer (Digital Lending) at OakNorth, you’ll work with product and engineering across multiple squads to make the right technical trade-offs and manage dependencies and communication effectively. Staff Engineers are highly visible leaders who demonstrate technical excellence and the company’s cultural values across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead squads to make sensible architectural decisions on the most complex technical problems.
• Ensure dependencies and communication are managed effectively across squads.
• Measure success by business impact, not output metrics like lines of code.
• Internalize and synthesize the best ideas across the organization to set a vision others can get behind.
• Embrace a DevOps culture: “build it, run it.”
• Prefer simple solutions over overly complex designs; challenge existing approaches when necessary.
• Maintain effectiveness in ambiguity (“organised amongst chaos”) and consider wider business impact.
• Utilize Generative AI (GenAI) tools to improve productivity and enhance decision-making processes.

Nice to have skills

• Experience with AI/LLM integrations and Generative AI applications.
• Knowledge of intelligent document processing and NLP techniques.
• Familiarity with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate) and search platforms (e.g., OpenSearch, Elasticsearch).
• Exposure to agentic workflows or orchestration frameworks for multi-step AI reasoning.
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tools/frameworks like Claude Code.

How you work (culture)

• Collaborate in cross-functional, mission-driven autonomous squads; pair program.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs.
• Practice continuous improvement with fast feedback and blame-free learning.
• Seek to understand users using data and conversations and participate in research.
• Enable continuous deployment and consider resiliency for highly productive delivery.