Andrew Lawson

I’m an experienced software engineer and engineering leader, working at Monzo Bank.

I’m most comfortable working with distributed systems and microservice platform design, with previous experience with monolithic and ‘many-service’ architectures.

Work Experience

  1. Monzo Bank Present

    Senior Staff Engineer (L70, Director) Present

    Senior Staff is a Director level individual contributor role where I'm focussing on:

    πŸ€– Augmentation Engineering

    I'm currently leading work to augment technical disciplines at Monzo with AI tooling and infrastructure. At the forefront of our work we've moved well beyond ad-hoc assistance and "copilot" workflows, to running pools of agents that investigate and build at scale. The aim is to automate workloads that are relatively simple but cost considerable effort so we can keep our growing engineering org focussed on harder, more meaningful, problems.

    🦺 Safer Changes

    I lead a programme of strategic work to level up how we make changes at Monzo to improve confidence in our ability to ship technical changes. The aim is to make sure that as Monzo's product grows in complexity and as the engineering org at Monzo grows in size over the next few years, we can maintain high velocity without compromising on safety or quality.

    πŸ‹ Monzo Stand-in

    Throughout 2023 I lead a large programme of work engineering a new platform we call Monzo Stand-in, aimed at overhauling the resiliency of Monzo's most critical systems. I've written more about this work at Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in and I talked about it at LeadDev LDX3 2025, Google Cloud Summit 2025 and AWS re:Invent 2025.

    πŸ’· Payments Collective Leadership

    Extending my role in Banking Services Group, we expanded the group to 10 teams focussed on Payments and Finance systems, products, infrastructure and data. My role is to guide technical outcomes of the collective, working with the leads of each group and teams within the collective, and to identify opportunities and risks alongside others in senior leadership.

    Staff Engineer (L60)

    Expanding on my domains at Monzo as a Staff Engineer I worked on:

    🏦 Banking Services Group

    Expanding on my domains at Monzo as a Staff Engineer I worked on: In early 2022 I moved to tech lead a new group of Finance and Payments engineering squads, focussed on building our core banking platform. My role involves, amongst other things, working on defining the technical direction and strategy for the group, identifying problems and opportunities across the company that our squads are well placed to solve, diving deep into early technical programme scoping, and working closely with our tech leads to guide, coach and challenge to help them succeed.

    πŸ’° Finance Engineering

    In September 2020 I moved to tech lead the Internal Finance Systems (now Finance Infrastructure) squad. The squad focussed on enhancing the maturity of our finance functions and on expanding our financial capabilities as the bank grew. This included building and owning our various Ledger and Treasury and other Accounting systems, as well as enabling engineers around Monzo to build financial products. The squad included backend engineers, data analysts and analytics engineers.

    Senior Backend Engineer (L50)

    I've been fortunate to have worked in a few domains as a Senior Engineer at Monzo, including:

    πŸ₯¦ Money Collective Risks

    In late 2019 I joined a small squad to build our controls & processes within the Money Collective, focussing on risk. The scope of the work was very broad, including payment systems, internal financial processes, and escalating permissions for payment approvals. We built a number of new systems, but one in particular paved the way for widening the scope and improving the maturity of our banking platform.

    πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ US Expansion

    The project to launch a new Monzo product in the US started in early 2019 with 6 people including 3 engineers. We built everything we needed to launch an early MVP in the US. We built new payment systems for new US Monzo cards, product features, banking integrations, amongst others. It was a huge undertaking, but it was incredibly fulfilling.

  2. OnTrack Retail

    Chief Technology Officer

    Continuing again from my previous role in this company as the Head of Engineering, my role as CTO allowed me to focus more on the future of the company's technology strategy and partnerships.

  3. Head of Engineering

    Continuing from my previous role in this company as a Senior Developer, my role as the Head of Engineering involved leading our engineering and QA teams, shaping and simplifying our working processes, and working with technical clients and suppliers.

  4. Senior Developer

    More information available upon request.
  5. Graze

    R&D Developer

    More information available upon request.
  6. BraveNewTalent

    Developer

    More information available upon request.
  7. Fully Charged

    Developer/Director

    More information available upon request.

Formal Education

  1. Northumbria University, GB

    More information available upon request.

Last updated . Best viewed at adlawson.com/cv/. Also available in PDF.