I’m a backend software engineer working in the account management engineering group at Starling. I work in the (loosely named) payments and payees team.
We do all of the processing of payments and handling of standing orders before they go off to the payment schemes world (although that is soon to be changing #proj-payment-order-migration-from-customer) as well as managing payees and transfers.
We also do lots of other misc projects and we’re currently working on an exciting project #proj-basic-bank-account.
I joined Starling just over two years ago as a graduate, although I was a mature grad and a career switcher. I used to be a Civil Servant and worked in a few different government departments and in a few different roles, but most of my time was spent in policy at the Department for Education.
I sort of got interested in coding through my job – I worked with a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and decided I wanted to change things up and pursue that. So I started teaching myself Python in my spare time, and just really loved building things and problem solving.
From there, I decided I wanted to code as a day job and so enrolled on a masters conversion course in computer science, at the University of London. I was studying in the evenings and working in the day so it was pretty full on but definitely worth it as it landed me my first engineering job!
I feel like I’ve had opportunities to work on lots of cool things, but I’d say the one I’m most proud of delivering is JCA bereavement transfers. This was a feature that I worked on with many brilliant engineers, to support joint account customers when one person passes away. We built a new process to transfer everything from the customer’s joint account (including standing orders, direct debits, balance etc), over to their personal account using the external Current Account Switch Service. Previously this all had to be done manually by the bereaved person, so it felt really nice to build something to help some of our most vulnerable customers.
We’ve actually recently gone live with this and had our first successful transfer in prod!
Probably “Don’t be afraid to fail”.
I’ve definitely made my fair share of mistakes in my time here so far and I’m sure there’ll be many more to come! But knowing that there isn’t a blame culture, that people are always on hand to help fix things, and that everything can be a learning opportunity has been really nice, especially as a newbie engineer.
I really enjoy staying active, especially after a full day sitting at my desk, so I love pilates, step classes and going to the gym. I also like to read, although admittedly I go through phases of reading every day if I’ve got a good book on the go and then sometimes not for ages. I’m also a big country music fan and love going to see live music when I get the chance.
“Sophie joined as a graduate two years ago. Since then she’s worked her way up to become one of (if not the) most vital member of our team. I’ve received feedback from other engineers that if they have any questions about payments they usually go to her for answers.”
“She’s been leading projects such as JCA Bereavement Transfer, working directly with stakeholders to deliver a fantastic product. She also takes the initiative by picking up tasks outside of her area, anything that needs fixing really. She’s been in charge of numerous incidents, mostly related to payments, and have built up a great knowledge base in this area. She’s also a dependable and disciplined engineer. If I ask her to take over a task, I can trust her to deal with it however big the scope ends up becoming, seeing it to completion. She’s also been mentoring several new graduates in our team as they were rotating in and out, together with a Code First Girl. These have all flourished under her mentoring.
Sophie is still just in the beginning of her career, but you wouldn’t know it if you just met her. She’s gained so much momentum since her first day at Starling by pushing through boundaries and going above and beyond whatever she’s working on”
