---
title: 'Lead Engineer - Personal Savings at OakNorth'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-engineer-personal-savings-oaknorth-london-esm7ha02zqpr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Lead Engineer - Personal Savings at OakNorth

- **Company:** OakNorth
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/oaknorth/4fcb3e37-5134-404a-bc23-24f706eb09d1

## Job description

## ABOUT US

At OakNorth, we're on a mission to empower ambitious businesses and the communities they serve. Since 2015, we've lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while driving economic growth in the markets we serve.

## About the team

Personal Savings and Wealth exists to make saving simple, personal and rewarding, helping families build financial confidence from everyday savings to long-term plans. We own the full product lifecycle, from spotting customer needs and shaping propositions through to design, build, launch and growth. That means the end-to-end experience across mobile and web, the secure, resilient systems behind it (money movement, identity and customer servicing), and working closely with marketing, operations and commercial teams to take products to market and measure what lands. We’re constantly improving our core savings products while bringing new ones to life, combining thoughtful design, strong engineering and a sharp commercial focus.

## The role

- Lead multiple AI-native pods while staying hands-on: coding, reviewing and pairing.
- Manage stakeholders at every level, from product and commercial to risk and senior leadership, setting expectations and negotiating trade-offs.
- Turn customer and business needs into products that land, bringing stakeholders with you from idea to launch.
- Own technical delivery and measure success by business impact, not lines of code.
- Design simple, resilient, scalable event-driven systems: you build it, you run it.
- Break complex problems into incremental, shippable steps with clear domain boundaries.
- Shape platform-wide architecture with an eye on wider business impact.
- Coach and mentor engineers by example.
- Use GenAI to move faster and decide better and help set the direction for how it’s embedded across the organisation.

Technology We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use now:

- Python, NodeJS
- TypeScript, React, styled components
- PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
- Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
- AWS, GCP
- Docker, Terraform, GitHub, CircleCI

## How we expect you to work

We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:

- Collaborate - We work in cross-functional, mission driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.
- Focus on outcomes over outputs - Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.
- Practice continuous improvement - We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame-free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.
- Seek to understand our users - We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users' needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.
- Embrace and enable continuous deployment - Seamless delivery of changes into an environment - without manual intervention - is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.
- Test outside-in, test first - TDD keeps us confident in moving fast and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset - writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.
- You build it, you run it - We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, can lead delivery of features from start to finish.
- Be cloud native - We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently.

## How we expect you to behave

We embrace difference and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:

- A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all
- Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together
- Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question
- No egos - people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely

## Benefits & Perks

- 25 days holiday
- Personalised benefits — opt-in to what matters to you
- Subsidised Private Medical Insurance with Bupa
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
- Wellbeing and social events
- In-house Barista Bar — London office
- Volunteering time off — support causes that matter to you
- Salary sacrifice schemes — cycle to work, nursery, gym, electric car scheme

## About OakNorth

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OakNorth is a UK-based digital bank founded by entrepreneurs, providing fast, flexible business loans and competitive savings accounts to support ambitious businesses and savers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (fully-licensed digital bank, profitable; not publicly listed)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Digital banking, commercial lending, retail savings
- **Target customers**: Lower mid-market businesses (entrepreneur-led, scaling fast) seeking debt financing from £1m to tens of millions; retail savers in the UK.
- **Mission**: “Banking should be barrier-free” – inspired by the founders’ own frustrations with traditional lending, OakNorth aims to back proven businesses with fast, data-driven credit decisions.

## Products & Services
- **Business Loans**: Flexible, structured debt financing from £1m to tens of millions for growth capital, acquisitions, management buyouts, and property development/investment.
- **Business Banking**: Digital account with dedicated support, seamless payments and cash management for scaling businesses.
- **Personal Savings**: FSCS-protected savings accounts (up to £120,000) with competitive interest rates, offered via a digital platform.
- **OakNorth Credit Intelligence (OCI)**: Data-driven technology platform that gives lenders a forward-looking view for agile credit decisions (used internally and sold to other institutions).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Cumulative lending of over £15.1bn since inception (2025). Annual profit of £165.2m in 2025. Total capital ratio of 18.4%.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founded and led by Rishi Khosla & Joel Perlman; backed by a range of institutional investors (details not fully public). Over 400,000 retail savers provide deposit funding. Partnered with LSE Generate for mentorship.
- **Growth Signals**: Named **Best Bank in the UK** at The Banker’s Bank of the Year Awards 2025. Recognised by CNBC/Statista as one of the UK’s Top 250 Fintechs. Expanded lending into the US in 2023. Built a diversified business including Business Banking capability. 61,000+ jobs and 36,000+ new homes created through lending. Offices in London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham, New York (OCI), and India (Gurugram, Bengaluru, Hyderabad).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Data-driven credit underwriting**: Uses proprietary analytics (OCI) to assess future potential, not just past financials, enabling faster, more accurate lending decisions.
- **Founder-led, flat organisational structure**: Decision-making is fast, with less bureaucracy than traditional banks.
- **Disciplined profitability**: One of the few digital banks globally to be consistently profitable, with extremely low credit losses (4.5 basis points of cumulative facilities).
- **Customer obsession**: High NPS and a culture of “customer delight” rather than mere satisfaction.

## Strategic Focus
- **US expansion**: Scaling lending in the US lower mid-market where a similar structural gap exists.
- **Business Banking rollout**: Building a full business banking capability beyond loans to deepen customer relationships.
- **Technology and data**: Continuing to invest in the OakNorth Credit Intelligence platform and automation.
- **ESG and community**: Net zero target by 2045; 1+1% initiative (1% of profits and 1% of employee time to charity).
- **Talent and culture**: Expanding teams across UK, US, and India while maintaining a founder-led, high-autonomy culture.

## Why Work Here
- **Equity**: Employees receive equity in the business, sharing in growth.
- **Flat structure**: Opportunity to interact with senior leaders and have real impact regardless of tenure.
- **Autonomy**: Personal goal-setting with manager support; freedom to take on projects of interest.
- **Mission-driven**: Directly contribute to creating jobs, homes, and supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
- **Culture**: Values include “Say it how it is” (honest communication), “10x” (set ambitious goals), “One team”, and “Momentum”.
- **Hybrid/Office**: Multiple office locations across UK (London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham) plus New York and India. Specific remote policies not detailed but likely hybrid for most roles.
- **Recognition**: Work for a bank that has won “Best Bank in the UK” and is seen as a top fintech employer.

## Sources
1. [OakNorth.co.uk – Home](https://oaknorth.co.uk/)
2. [OakNorth.co.uk – About/Our Story](https://oaknorth.co.uk/about/)
3. [OakNorth.co.uk – Careers](https://oaknorth.co.uk/about/careers/)
4. [OakNorth.co.uk – Annual Report 2025 (PDF)](https://oaknorth.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Annual_Report_2025.pdf)
5. [OakNorth.co.uk – Jobs](https://oaknorth.co.uk/jobs/)

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