Senior Payments Platform Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Payments Platforms Engineer to own and scale the infrastructure backbone that powers our fiat ↔ crypto payment flows. This is not a pure DevOps or SRE role; you will be a senior technical contributor who designs cloud-native platforms, defines engineering standards, and directly enables the product and engineering teams shipping the next generation of our payment infrastructure.

You will bring deep experience from a neobank, payment service provider, or financial institution — somewhere like Monzo, GoCardless, Wise, Checkout.com, Adyen, Stripe, Revolut, or a tier‑1 bank's payments division, where you have had to make cloud infrastructure reliable, scalable, and compliant under real‑world financial constraints.

What You'll Build & Own

• Design, build, and operate the cloud and infrastructure layer that underpins our entire payments stack.
• Work closely with our backend payments engineers, compliance team, and security function to ensure our systems are resilient, auditable, and production‑grade.
• Architect and operate our AWS-based payments infrastructure — multi‑region, highly available, and designed with financial‑grade resilience (active‑active or active‑passive failover, RTO/RPO commitments, disaster recovery runbooks).
• Own our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) estate using Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK — full lifecycle management of AWS resources including VPCs, EKS/ECS clusters, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, and API Gateway.
• Design and enforce network security architecture for a regulated payments environment: private subnets, VPC peering/PrivateLink for third‑party integrations (Plaid, Stripe, Chainalysis, etc.), WAF rules, Shield Advanced, and robust ingress/egress controls.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support safe, high‑frequency production deployments across our payment services — including blue/green and canary releases, automated rollback, and deployment gating tied to SLO compliance.
• Define and operate our secrets and key management strategy — AWS KMS, Secrets Manager, HSM integration where required for PCI DSS scope, and robust secret rotation practices.
• Own observability infrastructure — centralised logging (CloudWatch, OpenSearch or equivalent), distributed tracing (AWS X‑Ray or OpenTelemetry), metrics pipelines, and alerting that surfaces real payment failures, latency spikes, and compliance‑relevant anomalies to on‑call engineers.
• Platform compliance and audit readiness — design infrastructure controls that satisfy PCI DSS, SOC 2, and relevant FCA/regulatory expectations: immutable audit logs, access controls, data residency, encryption at rest and in transit, and evidence generation for auditors.
• Manage data platform infrastructure for our payments data — RDS Aurora PostgreSQL (primary OLTP, event streaming MSK/Kafka or Kinesis), and integration with any analytical stores used for reconciliation and reporting.
• Build reliability tooling — SLO/SLA dashboards, automated runbooks, chaos engineering experiments, and load/stress test harnesses for critical payment paths.
• Own disaster recovery and backup strategy — design and test multi-region failover, define RTO/RPO targets per service tier, build automated backup pipelines, and maintain runbooks for full and partial recovery scenarios.
• Ensure business continuity is provable, not assumed.
• Drive platform cost engineering — rightsizing, Reserved/Savings Plans, Spot strategy for non‑payment‑critical workloads, and tagging taxonomy for financial allocation across products.
• Support and mentor backend engineers on platform best practices — container packaging, 12‑factor apps, environment parity, and safe use of managed AWS services.

Who You Are

This is a role for a senior engineer who has built and operated payments or financial services infrastructure at scale, someone who understands that downtime in payments has real financial and regulatory consequences.

• Deep AWS expertise — hands‑on production experience across the core compute, networking, storage, messaging, and security services.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, SysOps Administrator) are a positive signal but not required.
• Payments or financial services background, you have worked at a neobank (Monzo, Revolut, Starling, N26), a PSP (GoCardless, Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Worldpay), or within a bank's payments/infrastructure engineering function.
• You understand the operational and regulatory environment these institutions work in.
• Infrastructure as Code at scale: you have owned and evolved large Terraform (or Pulumi/CDK) codebases, not just written modules.
• You have handled state management, environment promotion, and IaC testing patterns in a team setting.
• Container orchestration, strong Kubernetes (EKS preferred) or ECS production experience: cluster operations, pod security, autoscaling, service mesh basics (Istio/App Mesh or equivalent).
• Database platform knowledge: you have run RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL at scale for transactional workloads, understand replication, read replica routing, connection pooling (PgBouncer/RDS Proxy), and know when to reach for other data stores.
• Event streaming and async infrastructure: production experience operating Kafka (MSK) or Kinesis for financial event pipelines, including consumer group management, offset management, and dead‑letter handling.
• Security and compliance: you have worked inside or adjacent to PCI DSS, SOC 2, or FCA/PRA regulated environments and understand the infrastructure obligations this creates.
• On‑call maturity: you have been in an on‑call rotation for a 24/7 financial system and have written and iterated on runbooks, incident response processes, and post‑mortems.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with multi‑cloud or cloud‑agnostic platform layers in addition to AWS.
• Platform engineering or developer experience (DevEx) focus — internal tooling, golden paths, and self‑service infrastructure.
• Experience with Solana or EVM blockchain infrastructure (nodes, RPC endpoints, validator operations).
• Hands‑on experience with a policy‑as‑code tool (OPA, Sentinel) for guardrails on infrastructure provisioning.
• FinOps certification or deep cost engineering background in a high‑throughput payments environment.
• Experience with HSMs or dedicated key management hardware for PCI‑scoped systems.
• Strong scripting/automation background in Python, Go, or Rust for tooling and platform utilities.
• Crypto/web3 infrastructure experience — running nodes, managing hot/cold wallet infrastructure.

The Stack (Current & Target)

• Cloud: AWS (primary) — EC2, EKS, ECS, RDS Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, MSK Kafka, SQS, SNS, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, WAF, Shield
• IaC: Terraform
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS)
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, Grafana/Prometheus
• Languages (platform tooling): Rust, Python, Bash
• Blockchain: Solana (programs, RPC nodes, wallet infrastructure)

What It's Like to Work Here

• We work in person (London)
• The pace is intense
• Expectations are high and impact is immediate

Why Join Us?

If you have spent years making payments infrastructure dependable at a bank, neobank, or PSP and you want to apply that rigour to a product growing faster than almost anything else in fintech — this is the role. You will have real ownership, none of the corporate inertia, and a direct line between the infrastructure you build and the hundreds of thousands of users it serves every day.

Compensation & Package

Base Salary + Equity/Tokens / $450k Liquid comp

Interview Process

Recruiter / HR Call > Founder / CEO Interview > Technical Interview 1 > Technical Interview 2 (CTO)