Platform Engineering Lead

Role: Platform Engineering Lead / Platform Architect

Location: London, UK

Job Type: Full-Time Employment (FTE)

Work Mode: Hybrid

Onsite Requirement: 4 days per week mandatory

Role Overview

A UK financial institution has built a new banking platform on Kubernetes in AWS. You will lead the small platform engineering team that takes it through go-live and then runs it: you own the platform's reliability, security and engineering standards, and act as the link between the programme, central platform and security teams, and third-party vendors.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor: Lead and mentor a small team of platform engineers; set priorities, review designs and PRs, hire and onboard.
• Take the platform live: Own production readiness, DR testing, pen-test and vulnerability remediation.
• Run the platform: AWS, EKS, Terraform, GitOps, policy enforcement, messaging and observability, with runbooks and incident ownership.
• Own vendor connectivity and security: Private and mTLS integrations, certificate lifecycle and identity, working with vendor technical teams.
• Own architecture decisions: Write and defend ADRs at architecture review boards.
• Set CI/CD and promotion standards: Audited pipelines and release gates, agreed with central engineering.
• Plan and report: Jira backlog, status reporting, cost estimates; raise risks early.
• Support delivery partners: Onboard new services onto the platform.

Required Skills and Qualifications

• Hands-on AWS, Kubernetes/GitOps and Terraform at scale, with team or technical-lead experience.
• Solid grounding in PKI, mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, and network and edge security.
• Experience running production platforms, including DR and incident management.
• Experience writing architecture decisions and presenting them to governance boards.
• CI/CD expertise and a pragmatic approach to controls in a regulated setting.
• Clear communicator across security, architecture and vendor stakeholders.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering.

Desired Skills

• Financial services or payments experience.
• Message-broker and observability tooling experience.
• Experience with SaaS banking vendors.