Principal Software 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 Sydney so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person.

About the role

We’re looking for a Principal Backend Software Engineer to help build out our engineering team in Sydney, 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.

This is an exciting opportunity to build a team from scratch and grow the Starling culture into a new region.

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

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.

What you'll get to do:

• Support, grow, mentor and lead the team through being their manager
• Work with our clients to understand their needs and help solve their problems
• Define best practices for Technology and enable quality work
• Understand client needs and architect solutions to solve for many future clients
• Help us grow the team in Sydney
• 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 and this is what we have built our entire banking platform on. 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.

About you:

• a capable tech lead
• able to understand complex systems and design solutions to difficult problems
• comfortable talking to external teams to collaborate on delivering for clients
• an experienced Java engineer with cloud experience

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

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 a Principal Engineer - ~45 minutes
• Take home technical test to be discussed in the next interview
• Technical interview with some Engineers - ~1.5 hours
• Final interview, ideally face to face in Sydney, with our CTO / deputy CTO ~45 minutes