Pros
I have worked at both starling and engine for nearly five years total. - there are great opportunities to work on genuinely interesting technical problems. it's not a planet scale tech company handling FAANG tier traffic, but with millions of customers you do get the chance to own some really meaty technical projects, with critical performance considerations, if that's your thing - you can rapidly grow your career in this company but you will have to actually step up and own things outside of your assigned responsibility. it won't fall into your lap. you don't need to tread on your co-workers to achieve it. BUT, you will have to make sure your work is seen, by giving yourself a large presence on internal comms (i.e. slack) so people know who you are, which might not suit everyone, especially the quiet types. if you don't make yourself visible, you will struggle to progress - work life balance can be good within engineering. having said this, you will need to advocate for yourself and learn to communicate boundaries. sometimes you will get asked to do a lot. if you're too agreeable you may end up taking on too much; you are allowed to say no sometimes. I learned this the hard way - Engine is fun to work in. there have been and will continue to be growing pains, but overall the Engine team is extremely talented and has largely done a great job of what it set out to do despite the enormous engineering and organisational challenge last year. it is harder, you will be pushed more, and you will need to advocate for yourself to a larger degree, but the opportunity ceiling is a *lot* higher if you're willing to put in the graft and take ownership of things - extremely diverse engineering team. the gender balance across technology is close to 50/50 and this hasn't been a token effort - the company should make more noise about this. great opportunities with Code First Girls and similar initiatives. the talent acquisition team has largely done a stellar job here đź‘Ź - major growing pains with new management including new CEO but this has settled down now and we are largely moving in the right direction - there are very few bad apples within engineering. the culture is pretty stellar in this regard. I don't think I have worked with anyone I didn't like
Cons
- arguably not a con: if you're not a self starter you're going to struggle. don't expect anyone to hold your hand. you will be expected to contribute within your first few weeks, and to take ownership of making things better, and figuring out what work to do without being told. if you just do the tasks you're told to do and nothing more, without putting yourself out there, you *will* find it hard to progress: engineering management is light touch compared to other orgs. it is not built to support a managed scrum-type process. this works fine if you can hold your own - more bureaucracy and management overhead is cropping up at Starling, but it is after all a mature bank now: the FCA fine rocked the boat and in response there has been an over correction in some areas, as the company needed demonstrable top down observability over things like risk mgmt, compared to the startup approach of just let the team sort it out. on balance it's probably about as good as it gets for a company of this size: still leaves room to get things done without too much process, depending on which team you're in - your experience will be WILDLY different between engineering and non-engineering, and to a lesser degree between different teams within eng -- in terms of your stress levels, how well things are managed, and how interesting the work is that you are working on. - further to that point, bank operations and CS are essentially a different company to engineering, with its own culture that I don't know much about, but from what I see and hear it is not on the same level as the tech function - in my opinion, management has not done a good job of enabling and fostering meaningful communication between the engineering teams and the ops teams actually using the platform that eng has built. 4 years ago this was not the case. having said all this, it is not an easy task to maintain this for a company of this size compared to a startup - compensation is hit and miss. the pension is finally reasonable, as of this year. YMMV with salary, and salary bands are still private, although the salary bands do go quite high -- if you're a high performer - minimal opportunities for employees to invest or get shares in the company. salary is good and WLB is good overall but there's a distinct lack of bonus opportunities, and employees really don't have much stake in the long term performance of the company compared to competitors, so why would people go out of their way to go above and beyond? - engineering management is overall great but historically hasn't done the best job of identifying people who are not pulling their weight, to the detriment of colleagues