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Running a back-end team at Engine: In conversation with Staff Engineer Nicole Pilsworth

By Team Engine

Firstly, tell us a little about you, your background and what your role is at Engine

I joined Starling Bank 6 years ago on an internship after graduating from The University of Bath with a degree in Computer Science and Maths. Within a few months of joining Starling I converted to a full time Software Engineer, and earlier this year I moved to Engine as a backend Software Engineer, working on building out new features for Engine’s clients.

I moved to Engine because it was an exciting chance to see a company similar to Starling Bank at its early stages, while facing very different challenges as a SaaS company.

How has your role progressed at Starling / Engine to where you are now (a leadership position)?

There are lots of ongoing opportunities at both Starling and Engine to take ownership of technical challenges. I was fortunate to take some of these on at Starling, working autonomously on a few projects throughout my time there. These included working on our Public API and building out our in-house contact centre. Working on these projects resulted in a chance to take a leadership position on a project in Lending. Since then I’ve led a team at Starling and then Engine, working on a variety of tasks such as account opening and payments.

What are the challenges for you and your team when growing?

One of the challenges that we face is that relative to Starling, Engine currently has a smaller number of engineers while maintaining and growing a similarly-sized codebase. This means that domain knowledge is more thinly spread, so as we onboard more engineers, we want to share as much knowledge as possible. This will help us maintain the culture of all engineers feeling empowered to explore and learn about all areas of the codebase.

As we’re now working with multiple clients, another challenge is balancing requirements. For some products, clients have very different views on how they should work. We need to adapt how products are built to be configurable enough to work for several clients’ implementations, without letting client-specific code leak into the codebase. This is a balance that we will continue to improve upon as more clients onboard.

How do you onboard new members into your team?

New starters hit the ground running at both Starling and Engine, regardless of their level of experience. Our main aims in a new starter’s first week are to commit a change to our codebase, and to carry out a release to production (of course with lots of support from other engineers!). We generally spend a lot of time pairing in the first few weeks, as well as organising several intro chats to meet the wider Engine team.

What are you hiring for right now, and what does the future hold for your team?

Engine is hiring for several different engineering roles, including Java engineers, cross-cutting platform engineers, and many more. Our teams are currently broadly structured by project, but this may change over time as more engineers join Engine and we bring on more clients.

Engine is hiring rapidly at the moment, so team structures are evolving as we go. We’re looking to hire engineers who are flexible, enthusiastic and interested in taking on many different challenges - there are plenty to choose from!