The opportunity
OakNorth runs an £8bn balance sheet with a small, senior Treasury team. Reporting to the Head of Treasury, you will own the execution of the bank's derivatives and FX activity and its investment portfolio, the sizing of its FX funding and liquidity positions, and support for capital and wholesale funding issuance — building the analytics behind those decisions. Treasury here is run as a measurable profit contributor rather than a cost centre, and the decisions taken on this desk are a material part of that.
This is a hands-on execution role rather than an oversight one. You will be pricing, trading, sizing and building the analysis behind your own recommendations, and presenting that work in senior forums including ALCO and to the CFO.
The role is deliberately front-office weighted, but the team is small and the remit is broad. There is genuine scope to build depth in the wider Treasury agenda — funds transfer pricing, liquidity and interest rate risk frameworks, and Board and regulatory work — for someone who wants it.
Principal responsibilities
Derivatives and FX
- Execute interest rate swaps, cross-currency swaps and FX forwards across the bank's hedging programme. This is the most frequent trading activity on the desk and the centre of the role
- Price, negotiate and execute with dealers across the counterparty panel, and evidence best execution
- Own the FX risk position — including the USD lending book and intragroup exposures — and produce the exposure and hedging analysis that supports ALCO and Board reporting
- Monitor collateral and margin flows under CSA arrangements, including the liquidity consequences of adverse mark-to-market moves. Supports expansion and onboarding with additional counterparts
- Work with Finance on hedge designation and supporting documentation
Investment portfolio
- Execute the gilt and HQLA investment programme against Board-approved mandates, using asset-swap spread and relative-value analysis to inform selection
- Maintain and extend the portfolio construction tooling, including duration, maturity-ladder and concentration constraints
- Size and roll the Treasury bill programme against deposit deployment windows
- Support oversight of the externally managed AAA CLO portfolio, including trend and spread analytics and preparation for quarterly manager review
- Support expansion of the investment instruments to develop the liquidity portfolio
Capital and funding issuance
- Support the origination and execution of capital instrument issuance — Tier 2 and AT1 — working alongside the Treasurer, CFO and external advisers
- Build and maintain the analysis behind issuance decisions, including sizing, pricing benchmarks and comparable market levels
- Contribute to the development of wholesale funding options as the balance sheet grows, potentially spanning senior unsecured and secured issuance and securitisation
Funding and liquidity sizing
This part of the role is about sizing and direction. Operational execution and settlement sit with Treasury Operations; you set the strategy, size the transaction and steer the team.
- Own USD liquidity end to end — determining how much liquidity is required in currency, and executing the cross-currency swaps that deliver it within Risk Appetite Limits
- Set the sizing and collateral strategy for Bank of England repo facilities (ILTR and STR), instructing and reviewing rather than operating them
- Steer the wider team on the analytical basis for funding and liquidity decisions, and review their output
Analytics and automation
We work extensively with AI-assisted development — Claude and Claude Code — inside a GitHub-controlled workflow. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you do need to be able to build a working analytical tool this way, or to learn to do so quickly.
- Build, maintain and extend the desk's Python toolkit — pricing, sizing, limit monitoring and income attribution
- Replace manual spreadsheet processes with repeatable, auditable and documented ones
- Contribute to the Treasury Management System implementation and the Bloomberg data integration
Control, governance and reporting
- Ensure trades are captured, confirmed and reported in line with the Treasury Trading Policy and supporting procedures
- Monitor Risk Appetite Limits and Key Risk Indicators for front-office activity, and escalate promptly and clearly
- Prepare and present front-office inputs to ALCO
- Support regulatory deliverables — ILAAP, ICAAP and PRA information requests — from a front-office perspective
Essential experience and skills
- Relevant execution experience — typically three to six years in a bank treasury front office, money markets or ALM desk, or a markets and rates role with clearly transferable execution skills.
- Well-honed Bloomberg skills.. You should be fast and self-sufficient across money market and fixed income pricing, curve and relative-value analysis, swap and FX pricing, and the day-to-day ticket and blotter workflow.
- Instrument knowledge — interest rate and cross-currency swaps and FX forwards first and foremost, together with gilts, Treasury bills and repo including Bank of England facilities.
- Regulatory mechanics — a sound working understanding of LCR, NSFR and HQLA classification, as well as Capital regulation and how execution decisions move them.
- Python literacy — sufficient to build, read and debug analytical tooling (pandas, numpy), together with real enthusiasm for AI-assisted development.
- Communication — the ability to explain a trade, a number or a risk clearly and briefly to a senior, non-specialist audience.
Desirable
- CFA, FRM, BTRM in progress or complete
- Exposure to Clearing, CSA and margining mechanics, SA-CCR, or hedge accounting
- Securitisation, CLO or structured credit experience
- Exposure to debt capital markets — capital instrument or senior debt issuance, or securitisation — from a bank treasury, DCM or advisory seat
- Experience in a challenger bank or another small team where breadth was required rather than optional
Who will do well here
- You get things moving. Pace matters more than polish, and you are comfortable forming a view, making a call and owning the outcome.
- You learn quickly and want to. The technical range here is wide, and we would rather hire someone visibly capable and eager to grow into the full breadth of it than someone with a narrow and finished skill set.
- You are helpful by default. The team is small and nobody's job description is treated as a boundary.
- You are comfortable being challenged, and challenging back.
You thrive in a global team. The finance team is spread across the UK and India and you're good at building trust across time zones and you don't need to be in the same room to stay aligned.
