Platform Cloud Engineer (Python + AWS/Azure) in London

The Platform Engineering team (PENG) builds Beacon Cloud -- the cloud-hosted Platform-as-a-Service that major financial institutions depend on for quantitative analytics, real-time risk management, and trade operations. Every client gets a fully isolated cloud environment with elastic compute, a browser-based development platform, and a reactive computation engine -- all provisioned, versioned, and delivered as product by this team.

This is product engineering for cloud infrastructure. We design and build the systems that make the platform work: the Domain Builder that provisions complete client environments from an API call, the orchestration layers that let our users schedule and scale thousands of compute engines with two lines of Python, the cloud abstractions that let the same platform run seamlessly across providers, and the tooling that ties it all together. Each of these systems presents its own set of interesting technical constraints, from multi-tenant isolation to elastic scaling under demanding financial workloads to cross-cloud compatibility. A separate operations team handles day-to-day instance management -- this role is focused on building the product.

We are looking for someone who genuinely enjoys solving hard problems -- and doing it as part of a team. You might spend a morning pairing with a colleague to trace a subtle interaction between Python's import machinery and a multi-layered runtime packaging system, and your afternoon crafting the development plan for a new platform capability that will be used by thousands of users daily.

Please note: this is a software development role, not DevOps or SRE. We are looking for engineers who build platform product -- with strong Python skills and cloud experience.

What You’ll Work On

• Platform product development -- Design and build the systems that compose Beacon Cloud: domain provisioning and lifecycle management, release versioning and promotion, cloud resource abstraction, service mesh infrastructure, secrets and PKI management, elastic compute orchestration, configuration generation and distribution, and developer tooling. These are software engineering problems solved primarily in Python.
• Service and container orchestration -- Build and extend the orchestration layers that manage elastic compute workloads, batch scheduling, and containerised services across isolated client environments at scale.
• Cloud abstraction -- Build and extend the layers that enable the platform to run consistently across AWS and Azure, from image build pipelines to secrets management integration.
• Deep debugging -- Investigate and resolve complex issues that cross system boundaries: Python services, cloud provider behaviour, OS-level interactions, third-party component compatibility. Root-cause analysis is a core part of the job, not an occasional distraction.
• Architecture and code review -- Contribute to technical design decisions, review code, and shape the direction of a platform that financial services clients depend on in production.
• Client solutioning (engineering side) -- Work with solutions engineers and sales to understand client requirements and translate them into platform capabilities. Your engineering decisions directly enable revenue.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong problem-solving skills -- You can decompose ambiguous problems methodically, trace root causes across system boundaries, and know when to dig deeper vs. step back and rethink your approach.
• Python proficiency -- You write clean, maintainable Python and are comfortable working in a large, mature codebase. This is the primary language for everything we build.
• Cloud platform experience -- Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, Route 53) or Azure. You understand how cloud services compose, not just how to click through a console.
• A few years of software engineering experience -- ideally with a meaningful portion spent building platform tooling, developer infrastructure, or systems software.
• Ownership mindset -- You take responsibility for what you build, follow problems through to resolution, and care about the engineers and clients who depend on your work.
• Clear technical communication -- You can explain a complex system interaction to a colleague, write a useful design document, or articulate trade-offs in an architecture discussion.

Nice to Have

• Linux systems knowledge (Ubuntu, package management, image builds with Packer)
• Container technologies (Docker, image lifecycle, registry management)
• MongoDB or other document databases
• CI/CD pipeline development (GitLab CI or similar)
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries
• Familiarity with secrets management, reverse proxies, or observability tooling (Vault, nginx, Prometheus/Grafana)

The Team

PENG is a collaborative team where we solve problems together. Complex debugging, design discussions, and code review are shared activities -- not solo pursuits. We work closely with other engineering teams, both within CWAN and across our clients. Some of the most rewarding work happens at that boundary: understanding how platform decisions affect the engineers who build on it, and how their needs shape what we build next.

We know that great candidates don’t always tick every box on a list. If this work sounds interesting and you bring some of the experience described above, we’d genuinely encourage you to apply.

About CWAN

CWAN is the next-generation investment management platform: bringing together powerful execution, portfolio management, data, accounting, analytics, automated workflows, and real-time multi-asset risk and transparency across the full investment lifecycle. For 20 years, CWAN has helped thousands of organisations make the most of investment portfolio data with cloud-native software and client-centric servicing.