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// ← EVERY SEATTHE FUNCTIONS

Software Engineer (Banking)

Builds and runs the systems the bank's money, records and customers move through.

// 01 — THE WORK

The engineering is engineering — but the systems are ledgers, payment rails, limit checks and customer channels, where a duplicated message is a duplicated payment and an outage is somebody's payroll. Correctness, idempotency, reconciliation and an audit trail carry weight here that they do not carry everywhere.

// 02 — WHO ARRIVES HERE

Hired on the discipline rather than on banking: computer science graduates, bootcamp leavers and experienced engineers from other industries.

// 03 — WHAT THE INTERVIEW ASKS

These are the shapes the round takes, not a question bank — banks phrase them differently and the wording is never the point.

  1. 01Design a ledger, a payment rail or a limits check. Talk me through it.
  2. 02How do you make an operation safe to retry?
  3. 03What happens to the money while your service is down?
  4. 04How would you reconcile two systems that disagree?
  5. 05How do you ship a change to something that cannot be wrong?
  6. 06Why a bank rather than somewhere with fewer constraints?

What the panel is listening for. Correctness before cleverness, and whether you can name who is hurt when your component fails.

// 04 — WHY CREDIT PAYS IN THIS SEAT

Understanding what the bank is exposed to is the whole distance between an engineer who happens to work at a bank and a bank's engineer — and it is the qualification the second line screens for when it opens a role internally.

That is the general case as well as this one. A bank's technology is not ordinary technology and its finance is not ordinary finance, and the second and third lines of defence — risk, compliance, financial crime, model validation and internal audit — recruit heavily out of the functions, taking the people who can already read a business. The case drills are free and are the cheapest way to build that, whichever column you sit in.

// ALSO IN THE FUNCTIONS

The whole board, and how the four blocks fit together, is on what jobs banks hire for.