Android Engineer - Banking in Manchester

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.

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. 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.

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. 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, and as an Android engineer you’ll be working in at least one of such teams. 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 Android engineers with a variety of experience levels and interests, helping us improve and develop our Android app, CI automations and tooling. You’ll be committing, reviewing and shipping new code right from the first week!

Requirements
As an Android engineer, you’ll report to and catch-up regularly with a mobile lead engineer who will support you on your journey in Starling. 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 aim is to deliver stable, resilient and high quality code, that is why testing is another key quality we look for when expanding our team. We use Espresso to write our UI/E2E Test and JUnit to write our Unit Tests across all layers of the application, as well as manually test all features before they go into production. We also work closely with QA engineers to ensure we have an additional level of testing when working on complex feature delivery.

The Android world
In the Starling Android application we are proud to be working with some of the latest technologies in the industry. Our codebase is written entirely in Kotlin. We use MVVM to structure our presentation layer and Jetpack Compose with Material 3 for our UI, alongside a legacy of View/XML-based screens that we are progressively migrating. We use Kotlin Coroutines and Flow throughout the application stack for handling asynchronous operations, with RxJava retained in older parts of the codebase. We want our app to look great for the Android platform and have worked closely with our designers to set up a component library and have themed our app accordingly. Feature parity is important to us so Android and iOS apps are often built alongside each other.

We release app updates at least once a week, and the role of release manager is rotated equally throughout the Android team. As a team we meet together every week to talk through pain points and potential improvements we’d like to make to the project.

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. While we can’t accommodate every flexible working request, we're always open to discussion. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking - and that starts with our brilliant team. Starling Bank 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.