Is it easy to manage a team of highly qualified engineers? Clojure in Product podcast with James Trunk, Griffin

What happens when you combine banking regulations with functional programming? How do you grow an engineering team from 7 to 40+ while building a banking platform from scratch? These are just some of the questions that emerged in our conversation with James Trunk, VP of Engineering at Griffin, the UK's first full-stack banking-as-a-service platform.

James's journey from a "jaded Java developer" to leading a Clojure-based banking technology team raises fascinating questions about technical choices in regulated environments. What makes immutable data structures such a natural fit for banking? How do you maintain engineering velocity when real money is flowing through your systems?

The conversation ventures into unexpected territory when James compares programming to sculpting with clay, exploring how different technologies shape not just code but the entire experience of building software. We dive into questions of tooling, testing, and technical transitions that every growing startup faces - but with the added complexity of being a bank.

Through Griffin's story, we explore what it means to build reliable systems while keeping that "molding clay" feeling alive as your team grows. Could their unconventional approaches to technical decision-making hold lessons for other organizations?

You can find our conversation here, where we also discover James's burning question for our next guest about handling data shapes in Clojure systems.