Database Reliability Engineer (Hiring Immediately)

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time. 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. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

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. 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 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. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling 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 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 Data Environment

Our Data teams are aligned to divisions covering the following Banking Services & Products, Customer Identity & Financial Crime and Data & ML Engineering. Our Data teams are excited about delivering meaningful and impactful insights to both the business and more importantly our customers. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech .

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. 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.

What you’ll be doing:

• Modernize and Scale the RDS Fleet: Ensure the reliability of our existing RDS footprint. You will use Terraform to maintain the databases and automate strategies for performance tuning

• Evolve Observability & Monitoring: Build deep, proactive monitoring and alerting for our global database fleet. You will leverage Java-based data collection pipelines and metrics platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Dash0, Sentry, Humio) to detect performance regressions, slow queries, and health issues before they impact customers
• Fortify Business Continuity (BCP): Design and implement rigorous Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery strategies. You will build Java-based automation that ensures data durability and rapid recovery across regions, guaranteeing our databases remain resilient.
• Architect Cross-Cloud Portability: Use CNPG (CloudNativePG) and cloud-native patterns to ensure our database layer remains provider-agnostic, allowing seamless deployment across clouds
• Build Java-Driven Applications: Enhance production-grade Java microservices to orchestrate database monitoring, automated failover, and replication workflows

Requirements

• PostgreSQL Experience: You have hands-on experience working with Postgres databases. You understand core database concepts like query execution, indexing, locking, and performance tuning
• Systems Thinker: You believe infrastructure and database orchestration should be driven programmatically via Terraform and custom Java automation
• Distributed Systems Enthusiast: You are excited by the challenge of multi-everything—multi-tenant and multi-region data pl]]>