What Is the Starling Bank Interview Process Like? (Round by Round)

Starling Bank lists four stages in its own engineering job postings. The first stage is an interview with an engineer, listed at about 45 minutes. The second stage is a take-home technical test, which Starling describes as about a three hour exercise. The third stage is a technical interview of about 1.5 hours, where engineers review your submitted code and then ask design questions.

The fourth stage is a final interview of about 40 to 45 minutes, described as a conversation with the chief technology officer or the deputy. Engineering candidates commonly report three to four weeks from the first call to a decision, and longer waits are also reported.

Quick Overview

Stage 1: Interview With an Engineer

The first conversation is usually with an engineer or an engineering lead rather than a recruiter. Candidates describe it as a two-way discussion about their previous engineering work. Expect questions about what you built, which decisions were yours, and why you made them. Candidates also report the motivation question here, so prepare it in advance with how to answer why Starling Bank.

Starling states on its engineering careers pages that it hires for aptitude and attitude rather than specific experience or qualifications. Your reasoning about past work therefore matters more than the brand names on your resume. Some candidates also report a short call with an internal recruiter before this stage, which the job postings do not list.

Stage 2: The Take-Home Technical Test

This stage defines the Starling process. You receive a short brief and a link to the Starling public developer API, which is open to customers and partners. The task candidates report is a round-up feature.

For one customer, take the transactions in a given week, round each one up to the nearest pound, add the differences together, and move that total into a savings goal. For spending of 4.35, 5.20 and 0.87, the round-up total is 1.58.

The work uses three parts of the public API: accounts, the transaction feed, and savings goals. Starling also runs a sandbox environment, so you can test against a fake customer instead of real money.

Starling states an expectation of about three hours. Many candidates report spending far longer, often a full day or more, and several describe the brief and the documentation as unclear. Scope the work deliberately. A small, well-tested service with a clear readme file scores better than a large unfinished one.

Stage 3: The Technical Interview

This session runs about 1.5 hours, often with two engineers. It begins with a review of the code you submitted. Expect questions about your structure, your tests, your error handling, and the parts you chose to leave out.

The second half moves to system design on an online whiteboard. Candidates report questions about money transfer workflows, database design for payments, and how a system should behave when a service it depends on fails. The full topic list is in the Starling Bank system design interview.

Stage 4: The Final Interview

The last stage runs about 40 to 45 minutes and focuses on culture rather than code. Starling works in small cross-functional teams, and its engineering careers pages state that engineers develop, deploy, and support their own code in production. Those pages also state that Starling uses no estimates, no story points, and no t-shirt sizes. Be ready to say how you decide what to work on without those practices.

Timeline and Decision

Aggregated candidate reports put the average across all Starling roles at about four weeks, and about one in five candidates report a process longer than a month. Software engineering reports cluster around that same four weeks, while senior engineering roles are reported as somewhat faster. Graduate engineering hiring is reported as the slowest, at three months or more, and it follows a different route: a recorded one-way video screen, the take-home test, a technical video interview, and a final video interview with an engineering director.

The wait candidates complain about most comes after the take-home submission. Reported waits there run from about ten days to about three weeks, sometimes only after the candidate follows up. The pattern is covered in detail in how long it takes to hear back.

Questions to Ask Them

Every stage leaves time for your questions, and the job postings describe interviewing as a two-way process. Ask how a team decides what to build without estimates or story points. Ask how often engineers release to production, and who supports a payment service when it fails at night.

Ask how engineering effort is divided between the consumer bank and Engine, the banking platform Starling sells to other banks. A question built on their published engineering writing proves that you prepared.

How to Prepare

• Treat the take-home as the real interview. Read the API documentation first, write tests, and keep the service small and complete.
• Practice design on a blank screen. Grokking the System Design Interview covers the queues, databases, and retry patterns that payment questions need.
• Study their architecture. Starling publishes engineering posts, including "How Starling Builds a Bank" and "How we made everyone a Release Engineer".
• Practice coding regularly. Grokking the Coding Interview builds the fluency that a timed take-home rewards.