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. In Technology, we're asking that you attend the office a minimum of 1 day per week.
Our Engineering Environment
Starling engineers are excited about helping us deliver new features, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.
We are looking for 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.
We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.
Our mobile engineers work in cross-functional feature teams arranged across broader engineering groups. You are empowered to make the decisions necessary for the platform and to provide insight to the team leads on such projects. You’ll also be working closely with other mobile engineers with a variety of experience levels and interests. Expect to be committing, reviewing and shipping new code right from the first week!
Requirements
As a fully digital bank, we are looking for engineers that are able to understand and prioritise security when implementing new features, fixing bugs or making technical improvements, across all the layers. Our team is designing, building and releasing new screens every day, for this reason we are interested in people with a particular focus on Accessibility along with writing clean and maintainable code.
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 the code, shipping and maintaining it, 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 application is in the top chart of finance apps in the UK, with over 300K ratings and an average rating of 4.9.
Our iOS application is entirely written in Swift. It is highly modular and we use MVVM-C architecture to maximise code reusability and testing. We also value simplicity over complexity, fewer moving parts means fewer faults and easier comprehension.
Some of the well known frameworks and tools we use:
- RxSwift - as our reactive programming framework;
- SnapKit - as our auto layout DSL, though we have an in-house framework built on top of SnapKit which allows us to write declarative, SwiftUI like layout code for UIKit.
- Realm - as the application main persistence layer;
- Sourcery and SwiftGen - for various code generation tasks.
- SwiftFormat, SwiftLint and Danger - to enforce high code quality standards.
- Etc.
We also built in-house tools and frameworks as developer productivity and automation is paramount to us.
We are looking for iOS engineers to work on these apps who:
- Want to work on a feature rich mobile app with millions of customers;
- Can produce robust, well tested code that will give our customers the reliability that they need;
- Care about the product, the user experience and the design;
- Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software;
- Our application is built with UIKit, knowing its concepts and components is a must.
- We use RxSwift in our project, experience with reactive programming will be a plus but is not required.
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 phone call: ~45 minutes
- Take home technical test (no time limit)
- Technical face to face: ~1.5 hours
- Final Interview: ~45 minutes
Benefits
- 25 days holiday (plus take your public holiday allowance whenever works best for you)
- An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
- Annual leave is increased with length of service, and you can choose to buy or sell up to five extra days off
- 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
- Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
- Life insurance at 4x your 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 giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
- Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing
About Us
You may be put off applying for a role because you don't tick every box. Forget that! While we can’t accommodate every flexible working request, we're always open to discussion. So, if you're excited about working with us, but aren’t sure if you're 100% there yet, get in touch anyway. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking – and that starts with our brilliant team. Whatever came before, we’re proud to bring together people of all backgrounds and experiences who love working together to solve problems.
Starling is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Starling Bank are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice.
By submitting your application, you agree that Starling may collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we may process, where we may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.
