Frontend Engineer

Starling; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company in the UK is looking for a Frontend Engineer to contribute to their platform and tooling. This role involves building new features and enhancing existing ones primarily for internal use. The ideal candidate will have at least 5 years of front-end engineering experience with a strong command of HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and React. You will work in a collaborative team environment focused on transforming banking through technology, plus enjoy generous benefits like 33 days holiday and private medical insurance.

Benefits

33 days holiday

Annual leave increases with service

Paid volunteering time

Private Medical Insurance

Salary sacrifice pension scheme

Generous family-friendly policies

Employee discounts via Perkbox

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of experience as a professional front-end engineer.
• Experience with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and React.
• Proven ability to build accessible websites and secure web applications.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the platform and internal tooling.
• Build new features and products from scratch.
• Collaborate in small teams to deliver projects.

Skills

HTML5

CSS

JavaScript

React

RESTful APIs

Clean coding

Tools

Next.JS

Gatsby

AWS

Job description

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, and two years 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. This SaaS 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 have helped achieve Starling's success.

As a company, everyone is expected to roll up their sleeves to help deliver great outcomes for our clients. We are an engineering‑led company and we're looking for people who will be excited by the potential for Engine's technology to transform banking in different markets around the world. 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

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

Frontend Engineer

We are seeking a Frontend Engineer to join our team. You’ll be responsible for making our existing features work for banks around the world, as well as building new features from scratch. A key focus of this role will be on our internal portal and tooling used by our engineers, rather than the customer‑facing management portal. We value people who are engaged and care about our customers, the code they write, and the contribution they can make to banking worldwide. We’re looking for individuals with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams to do great things here at Engine and continue changing banking for good.

As an Engineer, you will:

• Contribute to our award‑winning platform and internal tooling
• Build new features and products from scratch in a configurable way
• Share your knowledge with those around you, contributing to our learning culture
• Own your projects, working in small teams to collaboratively deliver
• Aim for greatness in everything you do, staying curious and inquisitive
• Be part of a scaling team and organisation as we change banking for good

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.

Read about our work with Women In Tech, a Day in the Life of a Software Engineer at Engine, Leading at the Frontend and our interview with our Staff Platform Engineer.

Requirements

• Have at least 5 years of experience as a professional front‑end engineer
• Will have experience with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and know React very well
• Demonstrate experience building accessible websites and secure web applications that consume RESTful APIs and perform well
• Love coding in front‑end technologies – from navigating REST APIs to tweaking that last bit of CSS to get the design system just right
• Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment
• Like to take ownership of features from the original idea through to live
• Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software

The main part of our Frontend Tech Stack is listed below, we don’t ask that you have experience in all of this, but if you do, that’s great!

• HTML/CSS/JS (and increasingly TypeScript, too) with React used pretty much everywhere
• Associated libraries and frameworks like Next.JS, Gatsby, Redux, React Query and more
• Design system management (Storybooks are fairly common, little bit of CSS‑in‑JS, too)
• Testing tools like Jest and React Testing Library for the most part

We also stray into infrastructure work from time to time, using tools like AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFront, GCP or Firebase. Experience of all of these is not required, but some familiarity wouldn’t hurt. And if you’d like to learn any of them, we’d be more than happy to teach you.

Our Interview Process

• First interview: 45 minutes
• Take home technical test (no time limit)
• Technical face‑to‑face: 1.5 hours
• Final Interview: 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 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.