Code Meets Crypto

Mission & Impact: What aspects of Luno’s mission resonate most with you, and how do you feel your role contributes to that mission?

One of Luno's core design pillars is simplicity. If you look at the Luno app, you'll see that we strive for ease of use and user-friendliness. Since one of the company's primary goals is to put the power of crypto in everyone's hands, this philosophy plays a crucial role by lowering the barrier to entry for what is already a highly complex ecosystem. As someone passionate about blockchain, improving the accessibility of crypto—one of its largest use cases—resonates deeply with me.

As a backend engineer at Luno, I have the unique opportunity to influence the user experience more than in a traditional backend role, thanks to our increasing use of server-driven UI. In a nutshell, some of the screens you see in the app are dictated by the backend—from the text displayed to the buttons you interact with, the backend directs the frontend on exactly what to render. Implementing these server-driven screens is when I feel I contribute the most to the intuitive and user-friendly experience that Luno is known for.

Challenging Projects: Can you describe a time you faced a significant technical challenge at Luno and what you learned from the experience?

My team owns an internal cron job that ingests data from a third-party vendor and performs business logic on it. Sometime last year, we experienced a massive spike in data volume—from a daily average of around 700 data points to well over 600,000. This was several orders of magnitude beyond what the job was capable of handling within a reasonable timeframe. As a result, we were at risk of breaching regulatory service level agreements (SLAs) if the data wasn’t ingested on time.

Without getting too technical, I spent the next few days completely refactoring the cron job, parallelizing some of the work, and implementing a different retry strategy. Interestingly, the most valuable lesson I learned didn’t come from the coding exercise itself but from my interactions with the vendor’s engineering support team. I realized that when dealing with an external API, understanding and confirming its behavior under abnormal conditions is crucial for optimizing your solution.

Career Growth: What kind of professional development opportunities or resources has Luno provided that have been valuable to you?

There are two main areas that come to mind when it comes to development opportunities at Luno. The more obvious one is the annual £400 Learnably budget, which has allowed me to attend online courses and read technical books that I otherwise might not have purchased on my own. However, what I’m most grateful for at Luno are the unspoken opportunities.

While Luno has been around for over 10 years and has well-defined processes in place, it still maintains a startup/scale-up vibe, meaning you can make a much larger impact beyond the immediate scope of your role. For example, even though I’m a backend engineer, I collaborate closely with non-backend teams such as product, UI/UX, and others in my day-to-day work. During my time at Luno, I’ve significantly improved my soft skills and deepened my understanding of thought leadership from both technical and non-technical perspectives. If you're paying attention and willing to step outside your comfort zone, Luno offers countless opportunities for growth.

Culture & Innovation: How would you describe the culture at Luno in terms of supporting new ideas and approaches?

One of my favorite things about working at Luno is the openness to trying new things. Case in point: I noticed a bottleneck in how we ship server-driven UI for new user journeys—going from a design file in Figma to code in the editor was taking far too long. Neil, our principal backend engineer, sparked the idea of generating boilerplate code based on manually derived state transitions from the user journey. I took it a step further and asked, "What if we generated the code straight from the Figma file?"

This led me to develop an internal Figma plugin that converts flow prototypes directly into Go code. In typical use, the plugin generates over 500 lines of code with just 30 minutes of effort—a huge time saver compared to manually translating the design file into code, which could take several hours. The plugin has since been used to bootstrap multiple server-driven flows in production, all thanks to Luno’s culture of innovation. My manager, Tim, even allocated dedicated time during a sprint for me to work on it, which speaks volumes about how new ideas are supported here.

Customer Focus: How does your team keep the customer’s needs and experience in mind when developing technical solutions?

One of the best ways to stay in touch with what users want is to be a user yourself! Almost everyone on my team uses the Luno app in their personal lives. By dogfooding (yes, that’s a real term!), we naturally keep customer needs and experiences top of mind since we interact with the app just like our users do.

For example, when our UI/UX designers create the designs for a new feature, the entire team collaborates and reviews them together—not just from a technical perspective, but also as end-users. This hands-on approach helps us build solutions that feel intuitive and user-friendly.

Crypto Ecosystem: In your opinion, what’s the most exciting trend or development happening in the broader crypto space right now?

The crypto space is experiencing unprecedented regulatory action across many jurisdictions, most notably in the US. While regulation was—and often still is—seen as a threat to cryptocurrency’s original philosophy of decentralization and self-governance, it is ultimately inevitable in today’s economic landscape.

What excites me most about this regulatory shift is that it signals the gradual adoption and acceptance of cryptocurrencies and their underlying technologies. I believe that once the legal framework around cryptocurrency usage and ownership becomes clearer, we’ll see real adoption at scale.

Advice for Tech Candidates: What are a few key qualities or skills that you think are important for someone looking to join the tech team at Luno?

There’s a saying my fellow Lunauts like to use: Change is the only constant here. Given the volatile and fast-paced nature of the crypto industry, this couldn’t be more true. Anyone looking to join the tech team at Luno should be prepared to embrace change and adapt quickly.

But with change comes continuous learning. To thrive here, you need a curious mindset and a willingness to make yourself vulnerable in the pursuit of growth—whether that means improving your skills, filling in knowledge gaps, or tackling challenges outside your comfort zone.

Team Collaboration: How would you describe the collaboration within your team or between different teams at Luno?

Collaboration is at the core of how we work at Luno. As I mentioned earlier, I work closely with the product team, UI/UX designers, frontend engineers, and more. This level of cross-functional collaboration is standard practice here, especially when tackling complex projects that involve multiple teams.

For example, on a recent project where we introduced Luno’s first multi-network feature—allowing Nigerian users to send and receive USDT on both Ethereum and TRON—our team had weekly meetings and check-ins with other teams. These sessions helped us communicate progress, address blockers, and ensure that we stayed on track or adjusted expectations as needed.

Team Collaboration: How would you describe the collaboration within your team or between different teams at Luno?

Collaboration is at the core of how we work at Luno. As I mentioned earlier, I work closely with the product team, UI/UX designers, frontend engineers, and more. This level of cross-functional collaboration is standard practice here, especially when tackling complex projects that involve multiple teams.

For example, on a recent project where we introduced Luno’s first multi-network feature—allowing Nigerian users to send and receive USDT on both Ethereum and TRON—our team had weekly meetings and check-ins with other teams. These sessions helped us communicate progress, address blockers, and ensure that we stayed on track or adjusted expectations as needed.

Luno Values: Can you give an example of how you’ve seen one of Luno’s moontality in action within your team?

The most recent example that comes to mind is how our team embodied "Win Together" during the USDT/TRON project I mentioned earlier. To give some context, this was the first time Luno offered multiple networks for sending and receiving crypto. However, our codebase wasn’t originally designed with the concept of networks in mind—the network was simply implied based on the cryptocurrency.

To make this work, multiple teams had to refactor large portions of the codebase. Through constant communication, leveraging each team’s strengths, and actively unblocking one another, we successfully brought the project over the finish line. It was a true demonstration of collaboration and shared success.