Database Reliability Engineer, Starling
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
Mobile-first bank offering personal, joint and business accounts
Be an early applicant
Mobile-first bank offering personal, joint and business accounts
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To solve our customer's problems - and build the best bank in the world.
Role
Who you are
- PostgreSQL & Kubernetes Expert: You have an extensive experience working with Postgres and a passion for running stateful workloads natively on Kubernetes. You are excited to leverage CNPG to manage persistence, high availability, and automated failover
- Systems Thinker: You have a natural "reluctance for manual implementation." You believe infrastructure should be managed entirely via code, using Terraform to provision the foundation and custom APIs to handle the orchestration
- Distributed Systems Enthusiast: You are excited by the challenge of "multi-everything"—multi-tenant, multi-region, and multi-cloud—while ensuring rigorous data integrity and mobility
- A Security & Observability Mindset: You believe security is paramount. You focus on building deep observability (Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry/Humio) and automated guardrails so the fleet is secure by design without requiring manual intervention
- Engineering via Code: While you are a systems expert, your primary delivery mechanism is code. You leverage Java to build the robust, testable backend services that orchestrate our data layer, taking pride in clean relational modeling and performant DDL
- 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
What the job involves
- We are looking for talented data professionals 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
- Modernize and Scale the RDS Fleet: Ensure the rock-solid reliability of our existing RDS footprint. You will architect automated strategies for seamless, multi-version upgrades and proactive performance tuning to minimize downtime across hundreds of instances
- Architect Cross-Cloud Portability: Use CNPG and cloud-native patterns to ensure our database layer remains provider-agnostic, allowing seamless deployment across AWS and GCP
- Evolve Observability & Monitoring: Build deep, proactive monitoring and alerting for our global database fleet. You will ensure we have the visibility to detect performance regressions and health issues before they impact our customers
- Support Replication & Mobility: Support data streaming and "Zero-Downtime" migration strategies, ensuring data consistency and availability
- Fortify Business Continuity (BCP): Design and implement rigorous Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery strategies. You will build the automation that ensures data durability and rapid recovery across regions, guaranteeing that database remains resilient in the face of any failures
Application 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 - 30 mins with one of the team
- Stage 2 - Take-home challenge
- Stage 3 - 60 mins technical interview with two team members
- Stage 4 - 45 min final with two data executives
Our take
Starling started life focused on consumer banking, it has since found most of its success by competing in the business banking space. Its caught up with Tide and beaten the likes of Monzo and Revolut to a more complete offering for businesses.
This progress resulted in the company receiving a £100M grant in April 2019 from a body created to boost competition in SME banking, which it has used to accelerate building a full suite of digital banking products: intelligent forecasting tools, and digitally-enabled relationship management functions, as well as lending products. Since then, it has gone on to raise significant rounds of funding with leading investors such as Goldman Sachs.
As well as continuing to expand in the UK, its expanding in Europe. And its imminently launching an international bank in Dublin, which has allowed it to offer its current account across the European Union post-Brexit
Banking for small businesses has historically been ignored, even though the experience is poor. Starling is in tune with knowing what its customers want, and continues to build out its range of third-party products within its banking app thanks to support from its open API. Having achieved profitability, it currently has 26 integrations, including Xero, but that figure continues to grow.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 11 rounds)
Apr 2022
$175m
LATE VC
Jun 2021
$47m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.2bn
Company benefits
- Time off: 25 days holiday, plus your birthday as an extra freebie. You can also opt out of bank holidays and take them when works for you!
- Health insurance: Private health insurance with Vitality Health, one of the UK's leading private medical insurers
- Pension scheme
- Paid volunteering leave: We encourage all our employees to give back. You can take up to 16 hours paid leave a year, specifically to help causes meaningful to you
- Gym & cycle to work schemes: We offer discounted gym memberships and cycle to work schemes through salary sacrifice
- Perkbox: For a wide range of retail, entertainment and leisure discounts (as well as cash back) at a huge variety of businesses
Company HQ
Spitalfields, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Anne Boden
(Founder)Held senior roles in finance over a 30 year career, including COO for AIB and Head of EMEA for RBS. Was CEO of the company for 9.5 years.
Raman Bhatia
(Group CEO)Previously CEO of OVO, Board Member at Bud, Head of Digital Bank (UK) at HSBC and VP at HouseTrip, among other roles.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Starling
Manuela Torrijos-Simon (Group Financial Controller)
- In the spirit of Aiming for Greatness and Doing the Right Thing, we want to be the bank with the best approach to Diversity and Inclusion
- The Always Open Forum at Starling empowers employees to come together and own their areas of interest, supporting their agenda both internally and externally
- The forum creates a safe space for conversations about all Diversity and Inclusion topics, with the spotlight currently on 3 focus areas; Race and Ethnicity, LGBTQ+ and Mental Health.
- We’re about to launch a new group to support Disability, and all of these teams help bring Starlings together to improve our workplace
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