6 years at one company

I’ve now been working at Monzo for 6 years. This is the longest I’ve worked at any company, even though it doesn’t feel like it. Over this time a lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same.

During my time at Monzo I’ve run 100s of interviews, and often get asked the same set of questions by candidates. One of the most common ones is ‘why Monzo?’.

I’d like to explore this in a little more detail here.

Life before Monzo

First, a quick rewind into why I originally joined Monzo. Before joining I’d worked at a number of different companies - from small agencies, bigger tech companies and most recently contracting.

Whilst contracting gave a lot of flexibility* to choose projects etc, you tradeoff in other areas, as you’re less able to optimise for who you work with, and how you solve problems. *most of this flexibility is ’theoretical’, there aren’t always enough contracts at the right time to allow you to choose work that aligns with your goals/motiviations

I’d grown frustrated not being able to work on a product I actively use, and being empowered to improve it. This led me to make a change and apply to my ‘dream job’.

Joining Monzo

I’d been closely following Monzo for a number of years before joining. Since being shown the app by a friend in a cosy Edinburgh pub, then as an early adopter desperately waiting for my golden ticket to unlock the waitlist 🔐

During this time, Monzo was active in the dev community with the @makingmonzo twitter, the tech blog and numerous in person talks. It was a fascinating insight into how Monzo was built, and the kind of people that worked there. It seemed like a really smart bunch of people, working autonomously to build an incredibly useful product.

A few Twitter DMs with the lovely Emma and a few rounds of interviews and my job offer was in!

I joined back in 2019 with a 6 week old baby at home and now in 2025 I have 3 kids 🐣.

Why I’m still at Monzo

Interviewing at a company works both ways, you are being interviewed to see whether you have the right skills and culture fit to be productive and you are interviewing the company - is this a place I want to work?

During interviews you can get a good sense of the type of company it is, but there is always a sense of ‘what’s it really like’. Am I going to join and find the ship sinking and everyone already leaving? Or will it match/exceed my expectations?

I care deeply about 3 things (roughly in this order):

People - Who you work with every day. This has the biggest impact on your day to day as you’ll spend your time interacting with those around you.
Problems - What problems are there to solve in this area? Do your motivations align with these problems?
Growth - What areas are there for personal development? What opportunities are there to grow and critically, learn?

People

The culture of a company is the sum of the behaviors of all its people

People are in a lot of ways synonymous with culture. The people that make up a company are the ones that live the values, and transform ‘culture’ into something more tangible. Having an empathetic company culture requires hiring empathetic people that will live this value.

Monzo’s core culture and values have remained largely the same since joining. Hire smart, empathetic individuals and empower them to autonomously solve real customer problems. In practice this means you find a lot of ‘self starters’ - people who will go out of their way to find the right problems and come up with solutions. Pushing everyone around them to be better and do their best work.

I have a strong desire to surround myself with people more intelligent than me (not that difficult) and always be learning. This works best when working with empathetic people that are aligned with helping grow those around them, offering support when needed and challenge where appropriate. Monzo is and continues to be that kind of company - I know that I can go to any area of the business, engage with someone I’ve never worked with before, and be supported to find the right outcome.

Simply put Monzo has this in abundance. I’m surrounded by smart, highly motivated individuals who are a joy to work with. (Small watch out for impostor syndrome here - it is natural to feel it, particularly when you regard others around you highly)

In practice this might look like reaching out to an engineer on the borrowing team to find out if one of their systems is a good fit for a use case I have. This sounds trivial and a bit like ‘so what?’ but in so many companies I’ve worked at, the culture simply doesn’t align for this - ‘Helping you doesn’t help me so I won’t do it.’

Problems

The what of your day to day. The problems that you are tasked with solving, this could be copywriting for a new marketing campaign or designing a system to seamlessly handle changing interest rates or perhaps more ambiguously helping people budget. Find that sweet spot with what motivates you as an individual and the problems a company has.

If you love shipping quickly and often, and constantly ideating? Working on a team growing a new product sounds like a great fit. If you care deeply about resilience and ensuring correctness? Working on a team building the platform for others sounds like a great fit.

It’s important to understand the types of problems a company has and what drives you as an individual to find this sweet spot. For me personally, I wanted to spend time working on a product where I’m a customer and I can solve real customer needs. Why is Investing so difficult? Who actually knows what Pensions they have from previous jobs? Why can’t I freeze my card when I lose it, why do I have to replace it?

I’ve been asked by candidates ’the bank is already built, what else is there to do?’

At Monzo there is no such thing as ‘done’, there is always more to do. For some this can seem daunting, for others motivating. I find this incredibly motivating. There are such a vast number of problems to solve - it constantly forces me to learn better ways to manage my time and effectively prioritise.

Take a look at the product blog to get an idea of what has been shipped recently:

Investments
premium accounts
business banking for SMEs
pensions
…

Some of these products are entire companies in their own right.

Growth

The what’s next, your career trajectory? If you are someone who is interested in progressing their career, taking on bigger more ambiguous problems it’s important to find a company that has a strong track record of growing individuals and is itself growing. It is far easier to grow as an individual, when the company you’re at is growing too 🤝

As a contractor, it’s easy to stagnate. You are paid for the skills you have today and expected to deliver all of your energy into providing impact. This leaves growth up to you.

Joining Monzo was a multiplier for my career growth. Since joining I’ve been promoted, lead multiple teams, transitioned into an entirely new role as an engineering manager (read more about that here) and back to an individual contributor. The key repeated themes are

being empowered to solve a new (to me) problem
having a strong support network
receiving clear growth minded feedback

This means I’ve been able to grow into an area where I can operate more as a generalist, solving more ambiguous problems. Finding the sweet spot of personal growth and impact.

What’s next?

More. I look forward to 2025 as a year to continue growing - diving deeper into distributed systems, learning more about how to effectively analyse data, building high performing teams and continuing to solve real customer problems.

If after reading this you fancy joining Monzo, check out the careers page - you won’t regret it.

Happy 2025!