Android Engineer - Engine by Starling

At Engine by Starling, 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. 

Engine is Starling's software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, the technology that was built to power Starling Bank, and a year ago we split out as a separate business. 

Starling Bank has seen exceptional growth and success, and a large part of that is down to the fact that we have built our own modern technology from the ground up. 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.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Engine 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 offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person.

About Engineering at Engine by Starling - https://www.enginebystarling.com/

Engine by Starling engineers are excited about helping us deliver new features, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear more from the team in some case studies below, and our work with Women In Tech.

• Day in the Life of a Mobile Engineer
• Working as a Mobile QA
• Leading the Android Team

We are looking for engineers at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to banking worldwide. 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 an Engineer you will:

• Contribute to our award winning Android app 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

You are empowered to make the decisions necessary for the project and to provide insight to the team leads. You’ll also be working closely with other Android engineers with a variety of experience levels and interests, helping us improve and develop our Android app, CI automations and tooling. You’ll be committing, reviewing and shipping new code right from the first week!

As an Android engineer, you’ll report to and catch-up regularly with a mobile lead engineer who will support you on your journey in Engine. We have a strong collaborative and open culture here so you’ll find support outside your team too. 

As a fully digital bank, we are looking for engineers that are able to understand and prioritise security when implementing new features, fixing bugs or making technical improvements, across all the layers. Our team is designing, building and releasing new screens every day, for this reason we are interested in people with a particular focus on Accessibility along with writing clean and maintainable code. 

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 the code, shipping and maintaining it, 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 aim is to deliver stable, resilient and high quality code, that is why testing is another key quality we look for when expanding our team. We use Espresso to write our UI/E2E Test and JUnit to write our Unit Tests across all layers of the application, as well as manually test all features before they go into production. We also work closely with QA engineers to ensure we have an additional level of testing when working on complex feature delivery. 

The Android world 

In the Engine Android project we are proud to be working with some of the latest technologies in the industry. When adopting new technologies we always consider as a team whether it’s the best choice for our product and our users. 

We are currently in the process of building a number of SDKs for our clients utilising the modules we’ve already created in the Starling UK App. We’ll be using these to support the development of an app in Romania with SaltBank and build an entirely new banking app for one of our partners in Australia called AMP Bank, a really exciting opportunity! In the Engine SDKs we generally aim to use the latest technology as our clients would expect, but, we also rely heavily on the existing Starling codebase which uses some older libraries too, so you’ll need a good understanding of a wide range of libraries and technologies.  We use Dagger, Realm, Retrofit, Coil, Compose, Coroutines and Compose, but there’s still a lot of work to do migrating from XML layouts and RxJava2.

Building SDKs that we plan to launch internationally can present some new challenges, so if you’ve ever had experience maintaining a library, contributing to OSS, or have dealt with Internationalisation we’d love to hear about it. If that’s all new to you, don’t worry, we’re learning too!

We want our app to look great for the Android platform and have worked closely with our designers to set up a component library and have themed our app accordingly. Feature parity is important to us so Android and iOS apps are often built alongside each other. 

As a team we meet together every week to talk through pain points and potential improvements we’ll like to make to the project. We regularly meet in real life to attend conferences and meet-ups together too! 

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:

• First interview: ~45 minutes
• Take home technical test (no time limit)
• Technical face to face: ~1.5 hours
• Final Interview: ~45 minutes