Senior Platform Engineer in Birmingham

Acquired.com is a next‐generation payments business focused on powering recurring commerce. Our next‐generation payment infrastructure and solutions unify and optimise customers' payment ecosystem, providing a competitive advantage and helping them achieve their goals in the digital economy. We combine this capability with exceptional sector expertise and a highly personal, tailored service focused on long‐term partnerships with our customers. We're scaling as a business, so if you thrive in an environment that's constantly evolving, where purpose‐driven culture is seen as an enabler to achieve the extraordinary and where our unique differences are celebrated, we could be the place for you!

Your Mission

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you play a key role in designing, building, and evolving the platform that powers our engineering teams. Working within a small, high‐performance platform team, you take ownership of critical infrastructure, tooling, and automation — ensuring our platform is secure, scalable, and developer‐friendly. You go beyond execution — you influence technical direction, drive architectural decisions, and mentor team members. Your focus is on delivering a platform that enables rapid product delivery without compromising reliability, security, or performance. You operate with a strong sense of ownership, proactively identifying and resolving systemic issues, and you are a trusted technical leader within your domain.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Development & Enablement

• Design, build, and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and GCP, making informed architectural decisions that balance technical trade‐offs with business priorities.
• Lead the development and evolution of our Kubernetes‐based platform, including service mesh, deployment tooling, and runtime configuration.
• Own and drive improvements to developer self‐service capabilities (e.g. deployments, secrets management, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning).
• Champion infrastructure‐as‐code and configuration‐as‐code best practices across the engineering organisation.
• Identify and address systemic technical debt, improving long‐term sustainability and maintainability of platform systems.
• Automate routine operational tasks to reduce manual effort and increase reliability at scale.

• Lead incident response and drive thorough post‐mortems related to platform and infrastructure, ensuring lessons are captured and acted upon.
• Design and improve observability across the platform using Datadog and other tooling — ensuring systems are observable by default.
• Proactively improve system reliability, availability, and security through well‐considered enhancements and fast feedback loops.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across the full stack — from OS to application layer — to unblock product teams.
• Design and execute capacity, load, and volume testing strategies to ensure systems scale under peak demand.
• Collaborate with product teams to simulate real‐world traffic patterns, identify platform bottlenecks, and use test data to inform autoscaling, resource allocation, and architecture decisions.
• Work as part of an incident response rota to resolve incidents that occur outside of business hours.

• Influence architectural decisions and technical direction for the platform domain.
• Advocate for best practices in infrastructure quality, testing, security, and maintainability.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in cloud‐native technologies, platform engineering, and developer experience — proposing innovative solutions to real problems.
• Lead technical discussions and help drive consensus on complex platform challenges.

• Work closely with product engineers to understand pain points and reduce friction in the development lifecycle.
• Communicate technical changes, runbooks, and best practices clearly through documentation and Slack.
• Participate in planning and estimation of platform improvements and roadmap items, helping to align platform strategy with business goals.
• Collaborate across teams and disciplines to solve ambiguous, cross‐cutting problems.

• Mentor and support junior and mid‐level engineers, fostering a culture of learning, ownership, and technical excellence.
• Provide technical guidance and coaching to elevate overall team capability.
• Lead by example in demonstrating ownership, accountability, and collaboration.

Skills And Experience

• Extensive experience in platform or infrastructure engineering, with a strong track record of delivering scalable, reliable systems.
• Solid experience working with Linux (preferably Rocky or similar enterprise distros).
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), including networking, IAM, and compute services.
• Deep proficiency with Terraform and infrastructure‐as‐code concepts.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes (including Helm or Kustomize) and service mesh tooling.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, etc.).
• Strong working knowledge of observability tools such as Datadog for logs, metrics, and alerts.
• Comfortable writing scripts in Bash and working with other languages (e.g. C#, Python, or Go) where needed.
• Experience with load and performance testing tools (e.g. k6, Locust, JMeter, or similar).
• Ability to design and interpret capacity tests to inform scaling and resilience strategies.
• Strong understanding of CPU/memory/network utilisation patterns in distributed systems.
• Experience making architectural decisions that balance technical trade‐offs with business priorities.
• Excellent problem‐solving, analytical, and debugging skills across complex distributed systems.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with a proactive approach to mentoring and knowledge sharing.

Success Measures

• Delivery of high‐impact infrastructure and tooling that directly improves developer velocity and autonomy.
• Measurable reduction in manual operations and platform‐related incidents.
• Platform systems are observable, secure, and scalable by default.
• Positive feedback from product teams around ease of deployment and platform usability.
• Active leadership in post‐mortems, incident resolution, and reliability improvements.
• Measurable contributions to team mentoring, knowledge‐sharing, and technical excellence.
• Reduction in systemic technical debt and improvements in platform maintainability.
• Effective collaboration across teams to align platform capabilities with business goals.
• Platform availability and performance are maintained to a standard that protects merchant experience, with rapid resolution and clear communication when issues arise.

Department and Locations

• Department: Technology
• Locations: Midlands, Fully Remote