Software Engineer; Team Lead; Engine

Overview

Engine by Starling is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business built to power Starling Bank. Engine operates in a fast-paced environment with a flat structure to empower decision-making, innovation and collaboration. The role is based in Southampton, United Kingdom, and the team embraces a hybrid working approach to enable in-person collaboration when feasible. Our mission is to provide banks and financial institutions worldwide with innovative digital features and efficient back-office processes through Engine's technology platform.

As

a Staff Engineer you will

• Coach, mentor, and grow a high-performing team, ensuring their well-being as they work on high-impact solutions that bring value to Engine and our customers.
• Have the opportunity to lead multiple complex projects from inception through to run.
• Get hands-on when needed, using strong system design skills to help the team make smart architectural decisions and unblock complex challenges.
• Take ownership of technical challenges critical to the success of the business.
• Identify where existing tooling, applications, or processes can be enhanced and deliver innovative change.
• Collaborate with clients, solution architects, product owners, and other engineers to help meet client goals.
• Obtain a wide and varied understanding of how banks operate around the world.
• Shape the future capabilities of Engine, including approach, tooling, automation and architecture.
• Lead by example in codebase contributions, setting a high bar for others to aim for.
• Champion a healthy engineering culture built on continuous improvement, technical excellence, and a focus on the customer.

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 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.

Requirements

We’re open-minded when it comes to hiring and 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, mostly in Java, and we are looking for people who want to work on building tooling used by our engineers daily.

As a Staff Engineer you will bring the following experience or knowledge:

• Proven experience leading and mentoring high-performing engineering teams
• Delivering change to critical systems in a distributed environment
• Being a highly proficient developer with a high standard for technical and coding excellence
• Good understanding of Dev Ops practices
• Delivering complex outcomes across multiple domains and teams
• Working cross-functionally with technologists from other specialties and non-technical stakeholders
• Coaching and mentoring team members to upskill and develop their careers
• Leading the technical delivery on large-scale projects to successful completion

Backend tech stack (highlights)

• Java forms the core of our backend codebase
• AWS & GCP – cloud-native
• Microservice-based architecture
• Kubernetes (EKS)
• Team City for CI/CD (with multiple production releases per day)
• Terraform and Grafana

Our Interview process

• Initial interview with a Staff or Principal Engineer (~45 minutes)
• Take-home technical test to discuss in the next…