Database SRE

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.

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. 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 rock-solid reliability of our existing RDS footprint. You will architect automated strategies for seamless, multi-version upgrades and proactive performance tuning to minimize downtime across hundreds of instances
• Architect Cross-Cloud Portability: Use CNPG and cloud-native patterns to ensure our database layer remains provider-agnostic, allowing seamless deployment across AWS and GCP
• Evolve Observability & Monitoring: Build deep, proactive monitoring and alerting for our global database fleet. You will ensure we have the visibility to detect performance regressions and health issues before they impact our customers
• Support Replication & Mobility: Support data streaming and "Zero-Downtime" migration strategies, ensuring data consistency and availability
• Fortify Business Continuity (BCP): Design and implement rigorous Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery strategies. You will build the automation that ensures data durability and rapid recovery across regions, guaranteeing that database remains resilient in the face of any failures

Requirements

• PostgreSQL & Kubernetes Expert: You have an extensive experience working with Postgres and a passion for running stateful workloads natively on Kubernetes. You are excited to leverage CNPG to manage persistence, high availability, and automated failover
• Systems Thinker: You have a natural "reluctance for manual implementation." You believe infrastructure should be managed entirely via code, using Terraform to provision the foundation and custom APIs to handle the orchestration
• Distributed Systems Enthusiast: You are excited by the challenge of "multi-everything"—multi-tenant, multi-region, and multi-cloud—while ensuring rigorous data integrity and mobility
• A Security & Observability Mindset: You believe security is paramount. You focus on building deep observability (Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry/Humio) and automated guardrails so the fleet is secure by design without requiring manual intervention
• Engineering via Code: While you are a systems expert, your primary delivery mechanism is code. You leverage Java to build the robust, testable backend services that orchestrate our data layer, taking pride in clean relational modeling and performant DDL

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:

• Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
• Stage 2 - Take-home challenge
• Stage 3 - 60 mins technical interview with two team members
• Stage 4 - 45 min final with two data executives

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
• 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.

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. 

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 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.