At a Glance
- Tasks: Join a dynamic team to enhance a global payments platform through hands-on engineering and problem-solving.
- Company: Leading tech firm in Chester, focused on innovative payment solutions.
- Benefits: Attractive salary, health perks, flexible working options, and growth opportunities.
- Other info: Collaborative culture with a focus on career advancement and cutting-edge technology.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on critical payment systems while developing your skills in a fast-paced environment.
- Qualifications: 8-10 years in software/platform engineering with strong Java and database expertise.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 £ per year.
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.
- 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
