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.