Cloud Platform Tech Lead

Please note that these positions are based in London, the United Kingdom, Berlin, Germany, or Paris, France - relocation support is provided if required.

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe - we operate in 17 countries, serving +4 million customers who trusted us with over 35B in assets. But we're striving for more. We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank - serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We're a 50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default. We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 400 engineers can ship with confidence.

THE CLOUD PLATFORM JOURNEY

Trade Republic's cloud infrastructure spans multiple AWS accounts across development, staging, and production environments - supporting regulated financial services across 18 European markets. Today, much of this is managed through Terraform. We're making a deliberate strategic shift: moving from declarative infrastructure-as-code toward programmable control planes - Go-based systems that use tools like Pulumi and Crossplane to continuously govern, reconcile, and automate our cloud foundations.

This isn't about running Terraform plans faster. It's about building software that manages a bank's cloud infrastructure as a product - encoding compliance, security, and cost best practices into systems that enforce the right thing by default. The patterns are already proven: our Kubernetes fleet management uses Crossplane with Sveltos, FluxCD, and ClusterAPI, and our Temporal-backed control planes already manage database and messaging operations using Pulumi.

Now we need to bring this same approach to AWS account management, IAM governance, organisational structure, and networking - IAM policies, account structures, network topologies, and organisational guardrails, all governed through code that reasons about intent, detects drift, and converges autonomously.

We've gone from manually provisioned infrastructure to a platform where compute autoscales across clusters, fleet management orchestrates add-on lifecycles across environments, and infrastructure provisioning runs as self-healing workflows with cross-account automation - no human in the loop. The next frontier is bringing this same level of automation to the cloud foundations layer itself.

We also own Trade Republic's partner connectivity - the network fabric that connects us to exchanges, payment providers, and banking partners through site-to-site VPNs, AWS Direct Connect, VPC peering, transit gateways, and more. These connections are mission-critical and must be production-ready ahead of every company release.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Build cloud control planes: Design and implement Go-based systems that programmatically manage AWS infrastructure - accounts, IAM, networking, and organisational policies - replacing manual Terraform workflows with self-healing, intent-driven automation.
• Encode governance as software: Turn compliance, security, and cost requirements into programmable guardrails that are enforced continuously, not checked after the fact - meeting the same bar of reliability and self-service that our engineers already expect from the rest of the platform.
• Own partner connectivity: Build and operate the network infrastructure that connects Trade Republic to exchanges, payment providers, and banking partners - ensuring these connections are resilient, secure, and ready ahead of every release.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on call rotation for cloud infrastructure, ensuring full end-to-end ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction and drive it forward: Define the long term cloud platform strategy, drive cross team initiatives from kickoff to delivery, and align cloud infrastructure decisions with broader engineering, compliance, and cost goals.

WHAT YOU'LL SHIP IN THE FIRST 6 MONTHS

• Build control planes that integrate into Kubernetes fleet management - solving cross account and cross region connectivity, role management at scale, and levelling up our organisational structure.
• Continue refining cloud governance standards for IAM, account structure, and cost controls - pushing further toward enforcement through code, not process.
• Drive reliability improvements across partner connectivity - reducing manual effort, lead time, and failure modes for provisioning and managing network connections.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of experience in cloud platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or a related SRE/systems discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Go, with experience building infrastructure automation as software rather than scripts.
• Deep expertise with AWS - IAM, Organizations, networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN), and multi account architectures.
• Experience with infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane, or equivalent) and a clear understanding of when declarative configuration ends and programmable control planes begin.
• A track record of building systems that enforce compliance, security, and cost governance through automation rather than manual review.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud native architectures in production.
• Ability to drive cross team technical initiatives end to end, from ambiguous problem to shipped solution.
• Ability to contribute to architectural decisions and clearly communicate trade offs to both engineers and leadership.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.

WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW

Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable - we're here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face - closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out! We believe it's our team's varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. We're committed to creating an environment where everyone feels respected and has equal opportunity to thrive in their careers.