Platform 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 one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager. 

About Engineering at Engine by Starling

Platform engineering is something we are passionate about, we pride ourselves on delivering software in a reliable, scalable and maintainable manner. Our platform is expanding and with it bringing new challenges to how we deliver software. All engineers are responsible for owning features from inception, through deployment, to running in production. Using a first principles approach, we aim to break down problems and implement solutions across every stage of that lifecycle. 

As an Engineer at Engine, you’ll be working on helping to build, scale and deploy our first in class cloud native banking platform to multiple cloud providers and regions globally. You will be encouraged to get involved in all areas of our platform. We value a multi-discipline approach to engineering and a culture that supports that. Some of the disciplines you will be exposed to include:

• Toolchain Development
• Build and Deployment Systems
• Observability and Reliability
• Runtime Orchestration; Control and Data Planes
• Global Multi-Cloud Architectures
• SaaS API Management and Security
• Core Java Platform

We do not expect you to have any experience in the above - we’re looking for curious individuals who like to work across multiple disciplines and see this as an opportunity to grow and learn about other areas.

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 Software Engineer
• Running a Backend Team

What you'll get to do:

• Design, document, build and maintain scalable software
• Improve the performance and reliability of cloud environments whilst measuring cost-effectiveness
• Help build and improve our software release and continuous deployment systems
• Embrace automation and be reluctant for manual implementation
• Implement security best practices
• Demonstrate knowledge of new technologies and changes in the industry
• Ensure platform compliance with ISO27001, SOC2 and PCI-DSS

Ideally, you will be an inquisitive Software Engineer, with an aptitude for finding clean and simple solutions to technical problems. You will be passionate about building observable and reliable systems that impact the wider engineering organisation. The ideal candidate will have experience with:

• A managed, statically typed language (Java / Go)
• Cloud native software (AWS / GCP)
• Container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• JVM build tools (Gradle / Maven)
• CI/CD (TeamCity or similar)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Cloudformation / CDK) 
• Experience with building API management solutions
• Experience with building build, deployment and observability systems

Desirably you'll have:

• An aptitude for thinking out of the box
• Experience implementing clean code and simple solutions
• A passion for highly automated and testable software
• Experience with security best practices for securing software in cloud environments.
• Experience with AWS, GCP or other cloud environments
• Understanding of database monitoring, analysis, disaster recovery and performance tuning

Our 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 interview with an Engineer - ~45 minutes
• Take home technical test to be discussed in the next interview
• Technical interview with some Engineers - ~1.5 hours
• Final interview with our CTO / deputy CTO ~45 minutes