Overview

At Engine by Starling, we are on a mission to find and work with leading banks around the world who have the ambition to build rapid growth businesses on our technology. Engine is Starling's SaaS business, and was spun out as a separate company in early 2024. Starling Bank has high growth and success, driven by a modern technology platform that is now available to banks and financial institutions globally, enabling innovative features and efficient back-office processes.

Our technologists are central to Engine. We operate a flat structure to empower decision-making, with innovation and collaboration at the core. We encourage ownership and cross-disciplinary contribution, and provide support across teams in a collaborative, open culture.

The way to thrive at Engine is to be self-driven and own your work from design and discovery to execution and continuous improvement, delivering the best possible results for customers. Our values are: 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. We prefer you to be located within a commutable distance of an office to enable in-person collaboration.

About Engineering at Engine by Starling

The Cross Cutting Engineering team builds and maintains the reliable, scalable infrastructure and tooling that powers our software delivery pipeline from code to production. We tackle complex challenges with a first-principles approach and foster a multi-disciplinary environment across the platform.

Platform Engineer—you’ll help build and scale our cloud-native banking platform across global providers and regions. We’re seeking engineers with a strong SRE mindset who own the entire software delivery pipeline and build internal tooling to empower teams in production.

Don’t worry if you don’t tick every box below! We value curiosity, willingness to learn, and a desire to work across disciplines. If you’re excited by the challenges of building and operating a global, cloud-native platform, we encourage you to apply.

We have a great team — read about our work with Women In Tech, a Day in the Life of a Software Engineer at Engine, and our interview with our Staff Platform Engineer.

What you’ll get to do?

• Building and Scaling Cloud Infrastructure: Design, build, and maintain our cloud infrastructure across multiple providers (including but not limited to GCP) and regions, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
• Building on Google Cloud: Contribute to the build-out and optimisation of our core "Engine" on Google Cloud Platform using Java and Kubernetes.
• Scaling our SaaS Release Tooling: Enhance and improve our multi-tenant, multi-region SaaS release and continuous deployment systems using Java, Golang, and Terraform at its core.
• Empowering Developers: Develop and maintain internal tooling using Java and Golang to improve developer experience and on-call efficiency.
• Automating Compliance and Security: Build automation solutions in Golang to enforce compliance and security controls across our platform.
• Driving Efficiency: Optimise the performance and reliability of our cloud environment with a strong focus on cost-effectiveness.
• Embracing Automation: Identify and implement automation opportunities to minimise manual processes across the platform lifecycle.
• Ensuring Security: Implement and maintain robust security practices to protect our platform and customer data.
• Championing Best Practices: Stay abreast of new technologies and industry changes, particularly in SRE practices and deployment automation, and share your knowledge with the team.
• Maintaining Compliance: Contribute to ensuring our platform adheres to relevant industry standards such as ISO27001, SOC2, and PCI-DSS.
• Collaborating and Learning: Work closely with cross-functional teams, share your expertise, and contribute to our vibrant learning culture.
• Aiming for Greatness: Strive for excellence in everything you do, maintaining a curious and inquisitive mindset.
• Documenting Solutions: Design and document scalable internal tooling clearly and comprehensively.
• Taking Ownership: Own features and improvements throughout their entire lifecycle.
• Participate in on-call: The option to join our on-call rota (not mandatory) to deal with interesting technical issues and gain deep insights into our platform's behavior.

Your place within the team will depend on your individual strengths and interests.

We are generally open-minded when it comes to hiring and we care more about aptitude and attitude than specific experience or qualifications.

For this role, we are looking for some specific additional skills - if you prefer Java-only roles be sure to check out our other Software Engineer roles.

What skills are essential

• Proven experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or similar role.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and/or Java (if you have experience with only one of these that's fine, we’ll expect you to pick up the other whilst you're here).
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Solid understanding and practical experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure-as-Code tools.
• Deep understanding of SRE principles and practices, including monitoring, alerting, incident management, and capacity planning.
• A strong focus on automation and a passion for eliminating manual tasks.
• Experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• A proactive and continuous learning mindset.
• Ability to design and document technical solutions effectively.

What skills are desirable

• Experience with other cloud providers, particularly AWS.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Experience with database technologies, particularly Postgres.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring systems, and a solid understanding of database monitoring, analysis, disaster recovery, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with compliance standards such as ISO27001, SOC2, and PCI-DSS is a plus.

Our Interview process

Interviewing is a two-way process and we want you to have time to get to know us as much as we get to know you. Our interviews are conversational, so come with questions and be curious. Typically you can expect the following after a conversation with our Talent Team:

• Initial interview with an Engineer – ~45 minutes
• Take-home technical task to discuss in the next interview
• Technical interview with some Engineers – ~1.5 hours
• Final interview with our CTO / deputy CTO – ~45 minutes

Benefits

• 33 days holiday (including public holidays)
• An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
• Annual leave increases with length of service, with option to buy or sell up to five extra days
• 16 hours paid volunteering time per year
• Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
• Life insurance at 4x salary & group income protection
• Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care
• Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr Mrs Smith and Peloton
• Generous family-friendly policies
• Incentives refer-a-friend scheme
• Perkbox membership with discounts and wellness platform
• Initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and EV leasing

About Us

You may be put off applying if you don’t tick every box. Forget that! We’re open to discussion on flexible working where possible. We’re on a mission to reshape banking and value diverse backgrounds and experiences who love solving problems.

Engine by Starling is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re committed to fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We consider applicants without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, disability, military status, or any other protected characteristic.

By applying, you consent to Engine by Starling and Starling Bank processing your personal data for recruiting and related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Notice.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

Platform Engineer