Software Engineer (ML Projects)

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! 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.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling 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 Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, 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 Starling 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 Starling - 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.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are aligned to divisions covering the following Banking Services & Products, Customer Identity & Financial Crime and Data & ML Engineering. Our Data teams are excited about delivering meaningful and impactful insights to both the business and more importantly our customers. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented 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 Starling. 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 Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

About the Role

The ML Projects team is at the forefront of bringing cutting edge machine learning to the core of what we do at Starling. As a software engineer on the ML Projects team you will work with other engineers and data scientists to design, implement and maintain features that make use of machine learning models under the hood. This could mean anything from creating a brand new ML-powered feature from scratch to seamlessly integrating a new model into our core banking platform. You might find yourself designing robust infrastructure and pipelines or discovering a completely new approach to a complex problem.

We believe in empowering our engineers to take ownership and drive solutions from ideation to launch. This means you'll have the autonomy to shape your own path, identify challenges, and collaborate with colleagues across teams to deliver impactful solutions across a range of technologies.

We are looking for a skilled software engineer who thrives on building and scaling complex systems. You should have a proven track record of delivering robust, multi-technology applications within an enterprise environment.

We’re open-minded when it comes to hiring and we care more about aptitude and attitude than specific qualifications. We are very open about how we deliver software. 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.

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

• Python
• Java, which makes up the majority of our backend codebase
• JavaScript, particularly React, which makes up our frontend
• Postgres and SQL
• AWS & GCP - we're cloud-native
• TeamCity for CI / CD (lots of teams are releasing code 15-20 times per day!)
• Terraform
• Prometheus and Grafana

If you've built and deployed complex Python applications or have experience with generative AI, we'd be especially keen to hear from you – we're always pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI/ML.

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:

• Stage 1 - 45 mins with one of the team
• Stage 2 - Take-home challenge
• Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
• Stage 4 - 45 min final with an two executives