Blog
By Team Engine
Firstly, tell us a little about you, your background and what your role is at Engine
I'm Chris Fey, a Staff Engineer at Engine, and I've been working at Starling and Engine for the past 4.5 years, primarily focusing on Android development. Over the last year, I've been dedicated to the Engine Android SDK project. Our SDKs enable our partner banks to rapidly develop mobile banking apps, often in less than a year.
How has your role progressed at Starling / Engine to where you are now (a leadership position)?
I joined the Engine team as the first Android Engineer. In under a year, we've expanded to a team of nine engineers. I currently lead the Android team, and in this time, we've successfully launched our first client to production and are on track to launch our second. This journey has involved a significant amount of work and dedication, but it has been incredibly rewarding.
What are the challenges for you and your team when growing?
One of the biggest challenges has been managing the volume of work and meeting tight deadlines. The pressure to deliver high-quality products on schedule is intense. To address these challenges, we focus on maintaining clear communication, setting realistic goals, and fostering a supportive team environment.
How do you onboard new members into your team?
Our onboarding process is designed to be both intensive and supportive. It starts with a couple of intense days to get everything set up, we have a setup script that does the heavy lifting and detailed guides. We aim for new members to raise and merge a simple PR on their first day. This approach gives them an immediate understanding of our development process and ensures they are set up properly for development. We follow this with various knowledge-sharing sessions on different aspects of our architecture and products. Each new joiner is paired with a buddy and has daily one-on-one sessions until they feel comfortable, which then transition to weekly and eventually fortnightly sessions.
What are you hiring for right now, and what does the future hold for your team?
We are currently hiring Android engineers at all levels. Our team is focused on product delivery for clients, leveraging existing functionality from the Starling project. This involves significant technical work to modularize and generalise components for use in different countries. The future is bright for our team as we continue to expand our capabilities and deliver innovative solutions to our clients.