Platform Engineer (Runtime), RTGS Technology
Location: Leeds or London
Job Description
This is an opportunity to do meaningful platform engineering work inside one of the UK’s most critical technology environments.
RTGS settles on average £800bn per day and is Critical National Infrastructure — the runtime platform your team builds and operates underpins how systems are deployed and run safely across RTGS Technology.
As a Platform Engineer in the Runtime team, you will be a hands-on technical contributor, working on the container orchestration and runtime infrastructure - including platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenShift - that delivery teams depend on to build, deploy, and operate their services reliably in production.
The runtime platform is provided as a shared service - enabling RTGS delivery teams to deploy and operate their services independently.
This role follows a “you build it, you own it model”. You are responsible not just for delivering platform capabilities, but for how they perform in production - diagnosing issues, restoring service, and improving the platform based on real operational experience
Flexible Working Options
This role is open to flexible working patterns, which may include:
- Flexible start and end times to each day
- A 50% in-office attendance requirement that can be spread across the month, with flexibility to reflect operational commitments such as on-call and out-of-hours work
- Working from abroad (subject to approval)
Opportunities in Leeds:
We’re excited to be growing our presence in Leeds, a city we’ve been connected to for nearly 200 years! Our modern, accessible office in the City Centre offers a supportive, flexible working environment. The majority of roles, including this one, are now available in Leeds, giving you the chance to build a meaningful career outside of London while contributing to our mission from a dynamic and growing location. You’ll work collaboratively with London-based colleagues in a hybrid model, with regular opportunities to travel into the London office to meet and connect together in person.
A day in the role:
Your day might begin with the team stand-up - aligning on priorities, identifying where the platform needs attention, and focusing on improving reliability, performance, and usability for RTGS teams.
Much of your time will be spent working directly in the runtime platform - building and maintaining Docker images, improving how workloads are scheduled and executed on Kubernetes or OpenShift, tuning resource utilisation, or resolving issues affecting how services behave in different environments. This is hands-on engineering work, often dealing with problems that only surface in real production conditions.
You may also be evolving the platform itself - applying upgrades, patching components, and improving how the runtime platform is maintained to ensure it remains secure, supported, and operationally robust.
At times, you will be investigating production issues - analysing logs and metrics, identifying root causes, and working with delivery teams to restore service safely. These are not just fixes, but opportunities to improve how the platform behaves under load and failure.
You’ll work closely with delivery teams - helping them understand how their containerised services and Docker images run on the platform, improving how they consume runtime capabilities, and ensuring they can deploy and operate confidently without relying on the platform team to do it for them.
Throughout the day, you will contribute to improving the platform as a whole - defining better runtime patterns, reducing operational overhead through automation, and ensuring predictable behaviour under both normal and failure conditions.
This role includes participation in an on-call rota. When on call, you are responsible for the runtime platform in production - responding to incidents, diagnosing issues, restoring service safely, and ensuring that lessons learned lead to lasting improvements.
Role Requirements:
As a Platform Engineer in the Runtime team, you will be an active, hands-on contributor responsible for both developing and operating runtime platform services.
You will:
- Deliver and operate runtime platform services - taking responsibility for both building capabilities and supporting them in production over time
- Build, configure, and operate container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or OpenShift, and the runtime infrastructure that supports them
- Build, deploy, and maintain Docker images as part of the runtime platform and its supporting tooling
- Enable delivery teams to deploy and operate their services by providing reliable, consumable platform capabilities
- Ensure runtime platform services are self-service where possible, reducing dependency on the platform team
- Improve how workloads run on the platform — including performance, scaling behaviour, and resource utilisation
- Improve platform resilience - ensuring predictable behaviour and recovery under failure conditions
- Maintain and evolve the runtime platform lifecycle - including upgrades, patching, and ongoing platform maintenance
- Apply an automation-first mindset to reduce manual effort and improve operational consistency
- Participate in the on-call rota, taking responsibility for diagnosing, resolving, and restoring platform services
- Ensure production issues result in improvements to platform design, automation, or operational practices
- Contribute to the security posture of the runtime platform, ensuring services operate within controlled and secure environments
- Maintain clear documentation for platform services and usage patterns
- Work within change management and governance processes appropriate for a regulated environment
- Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement across the platform engineering function
Minimum Criteria
- Hands-on experience working with container orchestration platforms (e.g. Kubernetes, OpenShift, or equivalent cloud-based services such as AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE) in a production environment
- Experience building, deploying, and maintaining Docker images
- Experience with Linux-based infrastructure
- Experience supporting production systems, including participation in on-call or incident response
- An automation-first mindset, with experience using scripting or infrastructure automation approaches
- Understanding of how containerised workloads behave in production, including common failure modes and recovery approaches
Essential Criteria
We are interested in hearing from candidates who demonstrate the following:
- Experience with container platforms such as Kubernetes or OpenShift in a production context, whether on-premise or with a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Ability to take ownership of runtime or infrastructure tasks and deliver to a high standard
- Experience contributing to incident response - including diagnosing issues and supporting service restoration
- Strong understanding of how runtime environments affect service reliability and performance
- A security-conscious approach to platform and infrastructure work
- Experience working within controlled environments, including adherence to change management processes
- Experience collaborating with engineering teams as a platform provider — enabling rather than blocking
- Ability to improve reliability and operational consistency through automation and sound engineering practices
Desirable Criteria
It would also be beneficial, though not essential, to have some of the following:
- Experience with OpenShift in an enterprise or regulated environment
- Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, or GCP) alongside on-premise infrastructure
- Experience in financial services, payments, or other regulated or high-availability environments
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code approaches and tooling
- Experience with observability tooling — logging, metrics, alerting, and dashboards
- Relevant infrastructure or platform certifications
- Exposure to enterprise messaging and integration technologies (e.g. Apache Kafka, IBM MQ)
- Understanding of event-driven and distributed system architectures
- Experience working in environments where runtime platforms interact with integration or middleware layer
Don’t hesitate to apply if you don’t meet all of the criteria. We value diverse perspectives and believe different experiences lead to stronger teams and better outcomes.
How this role fits into the wider Bank:
RTGS Technology is building a platform engineering function to support a service-oriented model for software delivery.
The Runtime team provides the foundational platform layer that all RTGS services run on. These platform services are consumed by delivery teams to deploy and operate systems in a consistent, reliable, and secure way.
As a Platform Engineer in this team, you will contribute directly to the reliability, resilience, and operability of systems that underpin Critical National Infrastructure.
You will work alongside other platform engineers with clear ownership of your area, and as the platform function grows, there will be opportunities to deepen your expertise and take on more complex platform challenges.
- Currently a non-contributory, career average pension giving you a guaranteed retirement benefit of 1/80th of your annual salary for every year worked. There is the option to increase your pension (to 1/65th) or decrease (to 1/105th) in exchange for salary through our flexible benefits programme each year. The Bank has the discretion to vary standard accrual rates and dial up and dial down rates at any time and to withdraw dial up and dial down options at any time.
- A discretionary performance award based on a current award pool.
- An 8% benefits allowance with the option to take as salary or purchase a wide range of flexible benefits.
- 26 days’ annual leave with option to buy up to 12 additional days through flexible benefits.
- Private medical insurance and income protection.
The Bank of England welcomes applications from all candidates, but as a UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) approved sponsor, we have a responsibility to comply with the Immigration Rules and guidance. As such, our ability to employ individuals who require sponsorship for immigration purposes is limited. The Bank cannot guarantee that you and / or the role you are applying for will be eligible for sponsorship and that any application made to UKVI will be successful. Eligibility will therefore be considered on a case by case basis.
