Pros
There’s a great sense of community in Engineering, which is separately managed across all products. There are a wide variety of opportunities from full stack to system level performance critical systems. Open source is widely used these days, and dedicated internal teams offer supported infrastructure, so you can use this to develop solutions with low operational burden. There are also developer experience teams offering integrated build and deployment tools. If you are a high achiever, who takes ownership of problems and is flexible in finding solutions, you can do well and the company will show loyalty and value your contribution. The company is also very active in its philanthropic work, being privately owned, and this carries benefits like free entry to many museums, galleries and other sites the company sponsors. There is a healthy internal job market for moving to new teams without leaving the firm.
Kontras
Having been a successful company for a long time, some teams have to deal with quite large quantities of legacy code, which takes a very long time to modernise incrementally. Focus on rewarding high performers means low and mediocre performers may well get zero pay rises. Being closely aligned with the finance industry, fully or largely remote work is generally not an option, which may be a deal breaker for some people. Production deployments typically require at least team leader approval in may teams, or higher approval for non-standard cadences—this helps ensure the stability of the system, but can be frustrating for those used to rapid continuous deployment. Engineers are all expected to be on an out-of-hours on-call rota for no extra compensation, although the frequency with which this occurs varies wildly between teams. In some teams technology choices are limited by running on older platforms.