Android Engineer

About Starling Bank

Starling is the UK’s pioneering digital bank dedicated to transforming the way people save, spend, and manage their money. As a fully licensed UK bank operating with a forward-thinking tech company spirit, Starling employs over 3,000 individuals across offices in London, Southampton, Cardiff, and Manchester. Starling is committed to fairness, simplicity, and demystifying money for everyone.

Work Environment

The engineering culture at Starling emphasizes innovation, collaboration, and taking ownership across all responsibilities. The company maintains a flat structure empowering engineers to make impactful decisions. Starling encourages support within teams and across departments to achieve shared goals.

Working Arrangement

The company follows a hybrid work model, requesting employees be within commutable distance of one of their offices. Technology team members are expected to be onsite at least one day per week to facilitate in-person collaboration.

Role Overview

As an Android Engineer, you will join cross-functional feature teams within broader engineering groups to develop, improve, and maintain the Android mobile application. You'll engage in decision-making for platform development and collaborate closely with other Android engineers. You will be expected to begin contributing code and reviews promptly and support the continuous delivery of new app features.

Technical Environment

The entire banking platform is primarily built in Java with most tooling developed in-house. The Android app codebase is entirely written in Kotlin, using MVVM architecture for the presentation layer, Jetpack Compose with Material 3 for UI, and gradually transitioning from legacy View/XML-based screens. For asynchronous tasks, Kotlin Coroutines and Flow are prevalent, with RxJava used in older modules. Dependency injection is evolving from Dagger 2 to Hilt, and data persistence is managed using Realm with ongoing migration to Room.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Android app features.
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code following best practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams on feature development and delivery.
• Participate actively in code reviews and knowledge sharing with peers.
• Take ownership of the full feature lifecycle from implementation through testing to release.
• Contribute to improving CI automation, tooling, and development processes.
• Ensure app accessibility standards are upheld during development.
• Support weekly team meetings addressing challenges and improvements.

Requirements

• Proven expertise in Android development using Kotlin.
• Experience with MVVM architectural pattern and Jetpack Compose.
• Strong understanding of testing frameworks like Espresso and JUnit for UI and unit tests.
• A commitment to writing secure, high-quality, and accessible code.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a fast-paced, open, and supportive engineering environment.
• Self-motivated with the capacity to take full ownership of development tasks.
• Experience or familiarity with dependency injection frameworks such as Dagger 2 and Hilt.
• Knowledge of asynchronous programming using Kotlin Coroutines and Flow.
• Comfort working with databases such as Realm and Room.

Benefits and Perks

• 25 days of holiday plus public holidays, with an extra day off for your birthday.
• Additional leave increases with tenure; option to buy or sell up to five extra days.
• 16 hours of paid volunteering annually.
• Salary sacrifice enhanced pension scheme.
• Life insurance at four times your salary and group income protection.
• Private medical insurance including mental health and cancer care support.
• Family-friendly policies.
• Referral incentives.
• Perkbox membership offering retail discounts and wellness resources.
• Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, gym partnerships, and electric vehicle leasing.

Interview Process

• Conversational interviews focusing on mutual fit.
• Initial technical discussion with an engineer.
• Take-home technical challenge.
• Live coding interview.
• Follow-up technical interview and final stage interview.

Diversity and Inclusion

Starling Bank embraces diversity and inclusion, welcoming applicants from all backgrounds regardless of race, religion, gender identity, disability, or other protected characteristics. The company commits to equal opportunity employment and creating an inclusive workplace culture.