Senior Platform Engineer in Chester

Insight Global are seeking Senior Platform Engineers (SRE) to join our Client's Platform Engineering organisation in Chester, supporting a large-scale global payments technology platform spanning treasury, high-value payments (SEPA, CHAPS, TARGET2, EURO1), ISO 20022 migrations, and data-driven transaction services. This is a hands-on engineering role operating at the intersection of Java development and site reliability engineering. Engineers act as the connective tissue between application teams, DBAs, and infrastructure — owning production triage, building shared platform components, and translating platform needs into infrastructure requirements.

Platform supports multiple global delivery trains: US (2), India (7), APAC (10), each with 8–10 delivery teams. Platform Engineering is the central escalation point during deployments and incidents. Hard settlement deadlines and zero-tolerance for payment failures mean triage speed and accuracy are critical. Engineers regularly navigate issues spanning application code, database, messaging, and infrastructure layers simultaneously.

Remit

• Production Triage: When something breaks, this person determines where in the stack the problem sits — application, database, network, or infrastructure — and routes it appropriately. This requires enough depth across all layers to diagnose quickly under pressure. DB knowledge is essential here: the ability to distinguish between an application-side issue (connection pooling, caching) and a database-side issue (partitioning, query execution, replication lag) is tested directly at interview.
• Building New Platform Components: Engineers build and maintain the shared platform services that payment workloads run on — message routing layers, ISO 20022 transformation/enrichment components, event streaming infrastructure (Kafka/MQ), observability tooling, and throughput management components for peak settlement windows. This is not payment business logic — it is the platform those payment services depend on.
• Infrastructure Specification: Engineers don't provision infrastructure directly — that sits with the CTI team — but they are responsible for understanding how their platform consumes resources and specifying capacity requirements. This requires the ability to translate application behaviour (throughput, latency, queue depth) into infrastructure terms.

Must-Haves

• 8–10 years across software engineering and/or platform engineering roles
• Strong hands-on Java development (Spring / Spring Boot preferred)
• Production system experience in high-scale enterprise environments
• Strong database engineering knowledge
• Data modelling and schema design
• Database architecture (replication, clustering, high availability)
• Partitioning strategies and query performance optimisation
• Oracle SQL / PL-SQL at production level
• Hands-on, operational Kubernetes or OpenShift experience — real deployment models, failure scenarios, and recovery patterns, not conceptual familiarity
• Monitoring & observability hands-on experience (Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent)
• Cross-layer troubleshooting: application (Java services/APIs) and infrastructure/platform
• Messaging/integration technologies (Kafka, MQ, or similar)
• Microservices architecture and end-to-end operational experience of microservice migrations
• Strong communication — must be able to answer scenario-based technical questions in depth, not at a conceptual level

Plusses

• Financial services or regulated environment experience
• Payments domain knowledge (ISO 20022, CHAPS, SEPA, TARGET2)
• MuleSoft / Mule ESB
• Unix/Linux and shell scripting
• Experience mentoring offshore/remote teams
• Networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, proxies)