Senior Software Engineer - Engine by Starling

Starling Bank is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking with more than 3,000 people in our UK offices and 4 MILLION customers in the UK! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way. Now we present… Engine by Starling.

Engine by Starling is Starling’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, the technology that was built to power Starling Bank, and over a year ago we split out as a separate business. We are on a mission to find and work with leading banks all around the world who have the ambition to build rapid growth businesses, on our technology.

This SaaS technology platform is now available to banks and financial institutions all around the world, enabling them to benefit from the innovative digital features, and efficient back-office processes that has helped achieve Starling's success.

At Engine by Starling, our technologists are at our very heart and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Engine is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, and discovering to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Engine - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of our Sydney office in the CBD, so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. 

About Engineering at Engine by Starling

As an early member of our Sydney Engine by Starling team, you will play a key role in shaping our ways of working as we expand to become a multi-region business. You’ll work on challenging engineering problems with talented colleagues across the world. This is a unique chance to contribute to a new team, and help establish a strong foundation for our global engineering practice.

We’re looking for Backend Software Engineers to work on the Engine Platform and make our existing features work for banks all over the world as well as building new features from scratch that Starling hasn’t released in the UK market.

Engine by Starling engineers are excited about helping us deliver new features, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest Blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they can make to banking around the world. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Engine, to continue changing banking for good.

As a Senior Engineer you will:

• Have the opportunity to lead projects or functional areas/domains within the Engine team and platform

As an Engineer you will:

• Contribute to our award winning platform and internal tooling
• Build new features and products from scratch in a configurable way
• Share your knowledge with those around you, contributing to our learning culture
• Own your projects, working in small teams across the bank to collaboratively deliver
• Aim for greatness in everything you do, staying curious and inquisitive
• Be part of a scaling team and organisation as we change banking for good

We’re open-minded when it comes to hiring and we care more about aptitude and attitude than specific experience or qualifications. We are very open about how we deliver software. For the most part we code in Java, but you need not be an expert when you join us! We believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment. If you care enough to find elegant solutions to difficult technical problems, we’d love to hear from you.

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

The main part of our Backend Tech Stack is listed below, we don't ask that you have experience in all of this, but if you do, that's great!

• Java, which makes up the majority of our backend codebase
• AWS & GCP - we're cloud-native
• Microservice based architecture
• Kubernetes (EKS)
• TeamCity for CI / CD (lots of team are releasing code 15-20 times per day!)
• Terraform and Grafana

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

• Initial phone call - ~45 minutes
• Take home technical test to be discussed in the technical interview
• Technical interview - ~1.5 hours
• Final Interview ~45 minutes - likely F2F in Sydney

• 25 days holiday. You’ll also get your birthday on us
• The option to opt-out of public holidays
• The option to buy/sell up to 5 days of annual leave a year
• 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
• Enhanced Pat & Mat leave
• Perkbox
• Length of service increased annual leave

You may be put off applying for a role because you don't tick every box. Forget that! While we can’t accommodate every flexible working request, we're always open to discussion. So, if you're excited about working with us, but aren’t sure if you're 100% there yet, get in touch anyway. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking – and that starts with our brilliant team. Whatever came before, we’re proud to bring together people of all backgrounds and experiences who love working together to solve problems.

Engine by Starling is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Engine by Starling are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. 

When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice. By submitting your application, you agree that Engine by Starling and Starling Bank will collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we will process, where we will process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.