Staff Infrastructure Engineer (GCP) - Engine by Starling

At Engine by Starling, we are on a mission to find and work with leading banks all around the world who have the ambition to build rapid growth businesses, on our technology. 

Engine is Starling's software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, the technology that was built to power Starling Bank, and a year ago we split out as a separate business. 

Starling has seen exceptional growth and success, and a large part of that is down to the fact that we have built our own modern technology from the ground up. The Engine technology platform is now available to banks and financial institutions all around the world, enabling them to benefit from the innovative digital features, and efficient back-office processes that has helped achieve Starling's success.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Engine 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. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. 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 Engine is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, and 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. Our purpose is underpinned by five values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Engine – 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. 

About Engineering at Engine by Starling — https://enginebystarling.com/careers/engineering/ 

We're looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to help us design, build and run the cloud foundations our first-in-class, cloud-native banking platform is deployed on — across multiple regions and cloud providers globally. You'll be an inquisitive engineer with an aptitude for finding clean and simple solutions to technical problems, passionate about building observable, reliable and secure systems that positively impact the wider engineering organisation.

Engine by Starling engineers are excited about helping us deliver new features, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear more from the team in our latest Blog or our case studies with Women in Tech.

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will:

• Design, document, build and maintain scalable infrastructure on GCP
• Ensure the performance and reliability of cloud environments whilst measuring cost-effectiveness
• Embrace automation and be reluctant for manual implementation
• Build systems with security by design as a core foundation
• Ensure platform compliance with standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS and 3DS
• Design and operate key and secret management on GCP — Cloud KMS, Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) and Secret Manager — including support for cryptographic key ceremonies
• Rapidly diagnose and fix client-reported infrastructure issues while maintaining peak security and performance
• Write clear technical documentation and host training sessions for the team
• Demonstrate knowledge of new technologies and changes in the industry
• Lead complex infrastructure projects from inception through to run, and shape the future capabilities of Engine — our approach, tooling, automation and architecture
• Lead by example in your contributions, setting a high technical bar for others to aim for

Requirements

We're open-minded when it comes to hiring and we care more about aptitude and attitude than specific experience or qualifications. If you care enough to find elegant solutions to difficult technical problems, we'd love to hear from you.

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer you will bring the below experience or knowledge:

• Proven GCP multi-region disaster recovery experience
• Confident at bootstrapping Google Cloud Organisations, hardening with policies and structuring an enterprise’s resource hierarchy
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services including GKE, Compute Engine, Network Connectivity Center, Cloud SQL, Identity and Access Management (IAM) and VPC Service Controls
• Experience writing clean, modular Terraform code
• Experience with service-oriented architecture using containers, distributed systems and immutable infrastructure
• Experience with key and secret management on GCP — Cloud KMS, Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) and Secret Manager — including cryptographic key ceremonies
• Experience designing hybrid connectivity from GCP to co-located Payment HSMs using Network Connectivity Center (NCC), Cloud VPN and Dedicated / Partner Interconnect
• Experience with Workload Identity and Workload Identity Federation for keyless authentication of workloads and CI/CD
• Experience with observability tooling — Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Managed Service for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry (we also use Grafana)
• Experience setting up Google Workspace / Google Cloud Identity
• Experience with automation using a scripting language like Python or Go
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines
• An understanding of RESTful API and event-driven concepts
• Comfortable writing RFCs and ADRs which can be taken from design to implementation and into Production with documented runbooks and operating models

Ideally you also have:

• Experience with Zero Trust security (mTLS, SSO)
• Experience with AWS
• Comfortable with bash and either Golang, Java or Python development
• Understanding of database monitoring, analysis, disaster recovery and performance tuning
• Understanding of networking and routing concepts (TCP/IP, VLANs, VPNs, BGP, etc.) and preferably experience designing and establishing connectivity between GCP and on-premise locations
• Awareness/ability to leverage Claude Skills during development

The main part of our tech stack is listed below. We don't ask that you have experience in all of it, but if you do, that's great!

• Java, which makes up the majority of our backend codebase
• GCP and AWS — we're cloud-native
• Container-based architecture
• Kubernetes (GKE on GCP, EKS on AWS)
• TeamCity for CI/CD (with multiple production releases per day)
• Terraform and Grafana
• RDS and CloudSQL for PostgreSQL

Our Interview 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:

• Initial interview with an Engineer — ~45 minutes
• Take-home technical test, to be discussed in the next interview
• Technical interview with some Engineers — ~1.5 hours
• Final interview with our CTO / deputy CTO — ~45 minutes

Benefits

• 33 days holiday (including public holidays, which you can take when it 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. 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. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking – and that starts with our brilliant team. Whatever came before, we’re proud to bring together people of all backgrounds and experiences who love working together to solve problems.

Engine by Starling is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Engine by Starling 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. 

When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice. By submitting your application, you agree that Engine by Starling and Starling Bank will collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we will process, where we will process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.

We use AI tools to support various parts of our recruitment process, helping our team manage applications and assessments more efficiently. These tools are strictly used for support and do not replace human judgment with all final hiring decisions being made by our team. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please reach out to us.