Lead Engineer - Digital Lending - US Expansion

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 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 fuelling the UK economy.
Team Mission 🚀 
We power OakNorth's relationship‑led lending with modern, modular tools across origination, underwriting, execution, and portfolio monitoring.

The Role 👋

• Lead a squad of 4-6 Full Stack Engineers.
• Responsible for technical delivery and ensuring the squad understands and focuses on the goal.
• Design resilient, scalable solutions for event-driven and distributed systems.
• Break down complex problems into incremental deliverables with clear architecture and domain boundaries.
• Measure your success in terms of business impact, not lines of code.
• Embrace DevOps culture: You build it, you run it.
• Prefer simple solutions and designs over complex ones.
• Influence architecture across the broader platform, making pragmatic, forward-thinking decisions.
• Coach and mentor engineers, guiding both their technical and professional development.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business needs into high-quality technical outcomes.
• Collaborate with designers on frontend work with attention to detail.
• You are a broad thinker with the capability to see the impact of decisions across the wider business.
• Utilise GenerativeAI: Leverage GenAI tools to increase productivity and enhance decision making processes within the role

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, and familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Tech stack 🧱

• We're pragmatic about our technology choices. These are some of the things we use at the moment:
• 🗃 Python
• 🗄️ PostgreSQL, BigQuery, MySQL
• 🎨 TypeScript, React, styled-components
• 🔧 Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, pytest
• ☁️ AWS, GCP
• 🚀 ECS Fargate, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

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, has the opportunity to 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. Where SaaS tools help us achieve more productivity and better quality results for a cheap price, we use these to automate low value tasks.

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 re