Android Engineer - Engine by Starling

About Engine by Starling

Engine by Starling is Starling's software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, the technology that was built to power Starling, and a year ago we split out as a separate business. We are on a mission to find and work with leading banks worldwide who have the ambition to build rapid growth businesses on our technology. Starling has built its own modern technology from the ground up, and this SaaS platform is now available to banks and financial institutions globally, enabling them to benefit from innovative digital features and efficient back-office processes that helped Starling achieve success.

Our technologists are at the heart of Engine and thrive in a fast-paced environment focused on building, creating, and disruptive technology that keeps us at the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions; innovation and collaboration are central to everything we do. We support each other across the team and the business—we are in this together. The way to thrive at Engine is to be self-driven and take full ownership of your work, from building and designing to sharing knowledge and ensuring efficient, productive processes to deliver the best results for our customers. Our five core 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 at Engine. Our preference is that you are located within a commutable distance of our offices to enable in-person collaboration.

Engineering at Engine by Starling

Visit the engineering careers page for more information: https://enginebystarling.com/engineering-careers/

Engine by Starling engineers are excited about delivering new features, regardless of their primary tech stack. Hear more from the team in case studies and our work with Women In Tech.

What You Will Do

• Contribute to our award-winning Android app 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 organization as we change banking for good

You are empowered to make the decisions necessary for the project and to provide insight to the team leads. You’ll work closely with other Android engineers with a variety of experience levels and interests, helping improve and develop our Android app, CI automations, and tooling. You’ll be committing, reviewing, and shipping new code from the first week.

As an Android engineer, you’ll report to and catch up regularly with a mobile lead engineer who will support you on your journey at Engine. We have a strong collaborative and open culture, so you’ll find support outside your team as well.

As a fully digital bank, we value engineers who understand and prioritize security when implementing new features, fixing bugs, or making technical improvements across all layers. Our team designs, builds, and releases new screens daily. We place particular focus on accessibility, along with writing clean and maintainable code.

The way to thrive at Engine is to be a self-driven individual who takes full ownership of everything around you—from building and shipping code to maintaining it and sharing knowledge with colleagues to ensure efficient, productive processes that deliver the best possible results for customers.

We aim to deliver stable, resilient, high-quality code. Testing is a key quality focus: we use Espresso for UI/E2E tests and JUnit for unit tests across all layers, and we manually test features before production. We also work closely with QA engineers to ensure additional testing for complex feature delivery.

The Android World

We are proud to work with the latest technologies and always consider whether a new technology is the best choice for our product and users. We are building SDKs for clients, leveraging modules from the Starling UK app. These SDKs will support a banking app in Romania with Salt Bank and a new app for AMP Bank in Australia. Our SDKs aim to use the latest technology while integrating with the existing Starling codebase, which includes older libraries. A broad understanding of libraries and technologies is required. We use Dagger, Realm, Retrofit, Coil, Compose, and Coroutines, with ongoing migration from XML layouts and RxJava2.

Building SDKs for international launch presents challenges; experience maintaining a library, contributing to OSS, or handling Internationalisation is desirable. If new to you, we’re learning too. We want our app to look great on Android and have worked closely with designers to establish a component library and theming. Feature parity between Android and iOS apps is important, and they are often built in parallel.

As a team, we meet weekly to discuss pain points and potential improvements, and we regularly attend conferences and meet-ups together.

Interview Process

The interview process is a two-way conversation. Our interviews are conversational, and we want you to get to know us as much as we get to know you. Expect the following steps after a chat with our Talent Team:

• First interview: ~45 minutes
• Take-home technical test (no time limit)
• Technical face-to-face: ~1.5 hours
• Final interview: ~45 minutes

Perks & Benefits

• 33 days holiday (including public holidays)
• Extra day’s holiday for your birthday
• Annual leave increases with length of service; 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 and group income protection
• Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth, including mental health support and cancer care
• Partner benefits with discounts from Waitrose, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Peloton
• Generous family-friendly policies
• Refer-a-friend incentives
• Perkbox membership with retail discounts and wellness platform
• Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships, and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing initiatives

About Us & Equal Opportunity

You may be hesitant to apply if you don’t tick every box. We’re open to discussion and flexible working where possible. We’re on a mission to reshape banking—and that starts with our team. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences who enjoy solving problems together. Engine by Starling is an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity and inclusion. Applications are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, disability, military status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

When you share your information, you consent to its processing under our Privacy Notice. By submitting your application, you agree that Engine by Starling and Starling will collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what data we process, where, why, and your rights regarding its use.