Staff Software Engineer - Database Platform - Engine by Starling in Southampton

At Engine by Starling, 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. Engine is Starling's software-as-a-service (SaaS) business and the technology that powers Starling Bank. Engine split out as a separate business in early 2024. Starling Bank has grown rapidly, and a large part of that success comes from building our own modern technology from the ground up. 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 have driven Starling's success.

Our technologists are at the heart of Engine, thriving in a fast-paced environment focused on building, innovating, and disruptive technology. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions, with collaboration and support across the business. The way to thrive at Engine is to be self‑driven and take ownership of everything—from building and designing to discovering and sharing knowledge, while ensuring processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best results for our customers. Our five values are: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

We have a hybrid approach to working at Engine. Our preference is that you are located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we can interact and collaborate in person.

The Cross Cutting Engineering team at Engine is the backbone of our innovation. We are dedicated to building and maintaining reliable, scalable, and maintainable infrastructure and tooling that powers our software delivery pipeline—from the first line of code to seamless production deployment and ongoing operations. We own the lifecycle of our features, tackle complex challenges with a first‑principles approach, and foster a multi‑disciplinary environment where you are encouraged to explore and contribute across the platform.

We take the battle‑tested banking technology pioneered by Starling Bank and re‑engineer it for the global SaaS market. We currently manage multiple clients on a SaaS basis, and as our client list grows, so does the complexity of our infrastructure.

The Mission: Database Manager & Replication Manager

We don’t believe in manual intervention. While our DBAs take responsibility for our PostgreSQL estate, our mission is to build the software layer that makes the “human-in-the-loop” obsolete and empower our technology teams to operate their own databases. We are building the next generation of tooling to manage a massive, multi-tenant estate where automation is the only way to scale. We are forming a new team (hiring for various levels of experience, from Senior through to Principal) to lead a multi-year roadmap focused on the development and evolution of two critical proprietary products:

• Database Manager: Our central orchestration platform and control plane. It integrates into our internal developer portal to handle ad-hoc maintenance—such as running VACUUMs, managing credential rotation, and terminating slow queries through a clean UI, ensuring no one ever needs direct access to a production database instance.
• Replication Manager: Our bespoke logical replication service. This system orchestrates and monitors data streaming, allowing us to perform major version upgrades and cross-tenant migrations with only seconds of downtime.

We are solving difficult problems at scale, including the exploration of cloud‑native solutions to enable a truly cross‑cloud database infrastructure. Your goal is to ensure that, as we onboard more global clients, our database infrastructure remains stable, resilient, and autonomous.

What You’ll Get To Do

• Scale for Multi‑Tenancy: Design and develop Java‑based services within Database Manager to manage an ever‑growing number of isolated database estates for our SaaS clients.
• Evolve Replication Manager: Enhance our data streaming orchestration to ensure “Zero‑Downtime” transitions and migrations are seamless across a global footprint.
• Architect Cross‑Cloud Portability: Work with cloud‑native solutions to build a database layer that is cloud‑agnostic, allowing Engine to deploy reliably across different providers.
• Eliminate Manual Toil: Build high‑level abstractions for complex maintenance tasks, ensuring the system proactively heals and maintains itself.
• Execute a Multi‑Year Roadmap: Contribute to the long‑term technical strategy of how Engine handles mission‑critical data at a global scale. Whether it’s as people lead or tech lead, you will be a spearhead in the upwards trajectory of the team. You will still be contributing heavily to the exciting technical work.

What We’re Looking For

• A Software Engineer First: Deep expertise in Java with JDBC; ability to build robust, testable, and maintainable backend services. Proficient in relational modelling and crafting clean DDL.
• Distributed Systems Enthusiast: Excited by multi‑tenant, multi‑region, and multi‑cloud challenges.
• PostgreSQL & Kubernetes Interest: Understand (or want to learn) the internals of Postgres and how to run it natively on Kubernetes.
• Systems Thinker: A natural reluctance for manual implementation; believes infrastructure should be managed via code and APIs.
• A Security Mindset: Security is paramount when storing and handling data; we do not allow DBAs or engineers direct access to production data.

Why join Engine?

This is a rare opportunity to sit at the intersection of Software Engineering and Database Internals. You aren’t just a user of the cloud; you are building the engine that makes the cloud work for the next generation of global banking. With multiple clients already live and a significant roadmap ahead, the impact of your code will be felt by millions of customers worldwide. Don’t worry if you don’t tick every box below! We value curiosity, a willingness to learn, and a desire to work across multiple disciplines. If you’re excited by the challenges of building and operating a global, cloud‑native platform, we encourage you to apply.