First 100 days with Engine by Starling

by Rikki Hodder

I’ve been in engineering for about a decade. I started my journey in the data science world, but swiftly jumped ship to software engineering. I’m predominantly a backend engineer, and I’ve been at a handful of companies, from a global fashion retailer to a multi-tenant insurance platform.

I joined Engine in Sept 2025 as a Senior Engineer for the Credit Cards team.

On joining, I was tasked with building out the end-to-end lifecycle for credit card fees. I've been responsible for identifying the specifics of the fee types required, defining their triggers, and designing robust processes to ensure accurate charging while maintaining full transparency for our customers.

I worked closely with a colleague who had been at Engine for a lot longer than I had, and it was a pleasure working so closely with her. The people at Engine are great.

Engine is the technology behind Starling, so there was naturally a lot of work to ensure the existing functionality worked with any new changes we made to the project. A lot of this was around our end-of-day processes, where I had to take a deep dive into the system to fix some very cunning little bugs.

At the time of writing, I’m the lead bridge builder for our mobile endpoints. If the mobile team is happy, it’s usually because our API contracts are solid. If they aren’t, I’m the one they come looking for.

I was surprised by how many processes the Starling Group has, which have all been written in-house.

Engine has our very own fully functioning framework.

• Want to use a queue? Not a problem.

• Need to perform a data backfill? No worries, just implement BackFillOperation.

Want a coffee? Sure, have our in-house barista make you a coffee with an Engine logo printed on the froth. Actually, don’t get too excited, this was just for our new London office’s opening day.

Don’t be put off by the fact you might feel unfamiliar with the codebase. As I mentioned above, many things are done uniquely at Engine, but there is a more than ample corpus of documentation explaining exactly how things work.

Look further than Spitalfields Market for lunch. There is another lunch market just down the road, which is cheaper and very tasty.

I hope to refine the pathway I take as I progress in my career, as it is still unclear to me exactly which route I want to pursue. In general, there is so much to learn at Engine and I'd like to be seen as the go-to person for many different areas.