VP of Platform Engineering in London

About Us YouLend is the preferred global embedded financing platform for many of the world’s leading e-commerce sites, tech companies, and payment services providers such as Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Mollie, Dojo, Paysafe, Just Eat Takeaway, and Takepayments. Our software platform and APIs enable our partners to offer flexible financing products, in their desired branding, to their merchant base. With YouLend's AI-driven credit risk assessment solutions, more merchants and SMEs than ever can receive fast, flexible, and affordable funding. We operate in 9+ geographies across the UK, EU, and the US. We believe that the future of financial services will be delivered by customer-oriented tech companies that embed financing in their customer journeys, and we are building the solutions that will power that future.

The Role We are looking for an experienced and visionary VP of Platform Engineering to lead our platform engineering efforts, setting the strategic direction and overseeing the development and scaling of our technology platforms. The VP of Platform Engineering will play a pivotal role in ensuring the robustness, scalability, and security of our infrastructure, enabling innovation across all product lines and ensuring exceptional user experiences. This is a senior leadership position that requires a deep technical background, exceptional leadership skills, and a strategic mindset. You will lead the teams developing CI/CD, tooling, test automation, infrastructure provisioning, and tooling to enhance development efficiency. You will manage Platform Reliability and Infrastructure, ensuring a reliable and stable platform. You will oversee YouLend’s Security and Observability frameworks, focusing on platform security, maintaining observability, and providing dashboards for developers to monitor service health.

The ideal candidate is someone who has successfully built and scaled platform architectures, led cross-functional teams, and has a proven ability to deliver mission-critical, high-performance systems in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities:

• Strategic Leadership: Define and implement the platform engineering strategy that aligns with the company's overall business objectives. Ensure that the platform supports scalability, performance, reliability, and security as the company grows.
• Team Leadership & Development: Lead and mentor a highly skilled team of platform engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and collaboration. Provide guidance, performance management, and professional development opportunities. Drive a culture of continuous improvement of development and infrastructure standards, ensuring sustained technology value for the business.
• Platform Architecture: Oversee the design, architecture, and development of scalable, high-performance, and secure platforms, including cloud infrastructure, microservices, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Scalability & Reliability: Ensure the platform is highly available and scalable to meet the demands of a growing customer base and evolving business requirements. Implement strategies to prevent downtime and manage disaster recovery.
• Collaboration: Collaborate closely with product engineering, data science, security, and other cross-functional teams to drive cohesive, integrated solutions that meet both technical and business requirements. Break down silos between teams and departments, ensuring seamless communication and shared accountability for platform success.
• Technology Leadership: Stay ahead of emerging trends and technologies, and ensure the platform leverages the latest innovations to maintain a competitive edge. Evaluate and introduce new tools, frameworks, and processes that improve efficiency and scalability.
• Operational Excellence: Define and implement best practices for monitoring, alerting, automation, and incident response to ensure a reliable platform with high uptime and optimized performance.
• Security & Compliance: Partner with security teams to ensure that the platform complies with industry regulations and standards, including data protection, privacy, and security best practices (e.g., GDPR, SOC 2, etc.).
• Cost Management: Optimize platform operations and infrastructure for cost-efficiency, particularly in cloud environments. Implement monitoring and alerting to keep cloud and infrastructure costs under control while maintaining performance.
• Vendor & Partnership Management: Evaluate, select, and manage relationships with technology vendors, service providers, and external consultants as needed to deliver on platform objectives.
• Metrics & Reporting: Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for platform performance, reliability, and security. Regularly report on platform health and progress to senior leadership.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in a senior leadership role focused on platform engineering, infrastructure, or cloud services.
• Deep experience in architecting and operating large-scale, high-performance platforms, including microservices, cloud-native applications, API-driven development, and distributed systems.
• Proven experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern DevOps practices (CI/CD, containerization, orchestration with Kubernetes, etc.).
• Exceptional leadership and management skills with a proven track record of building, scaling, and leading high-performing engineering teams.
• Strong collaboration skills with the ability to work across technical and non-technical teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts to business stakeholders.
• Expertise in platform observability, monitoring, incident management, and creating highly reliable systems.
• Experience implementing SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs is a plus.
• In-depth understanding of platform security, data privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOC 2, PCI-DSS).
• Experience managing infrastructure costs, optimizing cloud usage, and driving operational efficiencies.
• Proven ability to analyze complex problems, identify solutions, and execute on those solutions with cross-functional teams.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Advanced certifications in cloud technologies, security, or architecture are a plus.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in highly regulated industries such as fintech, healthcare, or telecommunications.
• Knowledge of AI/ML platforms or other advanced analytics infrastructure.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience with modern data engineering technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink, etc.).

Why join YouLend?

• Award-Winning Workplace: YouLend has been recognised as one of the “Best Places to Work 2024” by the Sunday Times for being a supportive, diverse, and rewarding workplace.
• Award-Winning Fintech: YouLend has been recognised as a “Top 250 Fintech Worldwide” company by CNBC.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes:

• Stock Options
• Private Medical insurance via Vitality
• EAP with Health Assured
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Modern and sophisticated office space in Central London
• Free Gym in office building in Holborn
• Subsidised Lunch via Feedr
• Deliveroo Allowance if working late in office
• Monthly in office Masseuse
• Team and Company Socials
• Football Power League / Squash Club

At YouLend, we champion diversity and embrace equal opportunity employment practices. Our hiring, transfer, and promotion decisions are exclusively based on qualifications, merit, and business requirements, free from any discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, religion, nationality, or any other protected basis under applicable law.