Database Engineer, Starling Bank
DBA
2-5 days a week in office
Mobile-first bank offering personal, joint and business accounts
Job no longer available
Mobile-first bank offering personal, joint and business accounts
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
2-5 days 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
- 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
- Proven experience working as a DBA
- Experience of using infrastructure as code. Preferably Terraform
- Experience working with AWS RDS Postgres or GCP Cloud SQL databases
- Understanding of Postgres administration, monitoring, disaster recovery and performance tuning
- Self-motivated person able to drive change, take initiative and own their work
- Ability to communicate at all levels of the business to understand the users needs
- Built and deployed PostgreSQL clusters into production (would consider Oracle/MySQL and similar technologies)
- Knowledge of Postgres configuration settings
- A strong understanding of Postgres’ vacuum/MVCC process
- Worked within high availability, scalable environments
- Ability to engage with all levels of the business to understand user needs
- Strong ability to solve complex technical issues
What the job involves
- Working within our engineering team, you will be responsible for the application and infrastructure used to support our PostgreSQL databases
- Working within the DBA team to build out our Database Manager application used to manage and monitor our databases
- Working with our teams to understand their database needs and make adjustments from an application and infrastructure standpoint
- Monitoring and optimising the performance of databases
- Query analysis to understand how our databases are being used
- Allocating for systems requirements and planning future needs
- Working within the team to understand how to manage and maintain Postgres database infrastructure
- Monitor and optimise the performance of our ever growing PostgreSQL database
- Keep our database estate up to date - both from a vulnerability management and supported Postgres version point of view
- Managing and monitoring data replication
- Lead regular disaster recovery testing initiatives
- Own and improve technical documentation and processes for database tasks - enabling teams to self help with e.g. allocating system storage and planning storage needs; performing upgrades; optimising database queries
- Own and improve monitoring dashboards and alerts
- Own cost optimisation - reviewing and proposing recommendations for optimising database footprint, including reserved instance lifecycle management
- Embrace automation and be reluctant for manual implementation
- Implement security best practices
- Demonstrate knowledge of new technologies and changes in the industry
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:
- First Interview - 30 minutes
- Technical Interview - 90 minutes
- Final Interview - 45 minutes
Salary benchmarks
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
$175.3m
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 Bank
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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