job specification

Platform Engineer (AWS / Terraform / Kafka) – Fintech Payments Platform

Location: Remote (UK/EU time zones)

Contract: 7 months (to April 2026)

Start: ASAP

Tech Stack: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Kafka, GitOps, Cloud-Native Tooling

Focus: Platform engineering & solution build (not ops/DevOps)

About the Role

We're looking for a Platform Engineer to join a major UK retail group building a new Klarna-style fintech payments platform. This role sits at the heart of the cloud platform team and focuses on designing, building, and automating the core infrastructure that powers high-scale financial transactions.

You'll work in a highly technical environment, collaborating with architects, backend engineers, and security teams to deliver secure, resilient, cloud-native foundations. This is a hands-on build role — not day-to-day ops or DevOps support.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Build & Infrastructure Engineering

• Design and implement scalable, resilient cloud platform components in AWS
• Own Infrastructure as Code using Terraform (modular, reusable architectures)
• Build secure multi-account AWS environments following Well-Architected principles
• Develop internal platform tooling, automation, templates, and golden paths
• Support EKS/Kubernetes environments and microservice deployment foundations

Event-Driven & Distributed Architecture

• Build and support Kafka-based event streaming and messaging capabilities
• Ensure high availability, reliability, and idempotent service patterns
• Work with engineers to define infrastructure for distributed, real-time systems

Observability, Reliability & Performance

• Implement monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing (Datadog/Grafana/ELK)
• Ensure SLAs/SLOs for platform components are met
• Contribute to disaster recovery design, multi-region readiness, and resilience testing

Security, Governance & Compliance

• Enforce best practices for IAM, secrets management, encryption, and network security
• Build guardrails, policies, and automated compliance into CI/CD and IaC workflows
• Contribute to platform risk assessments and mitigation strategies

Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Partner with architects, platform leads, and product teams to translate requirements into technical designs
• Work with developers to guide best practices for cloud-native builds
• Mentor engineers in IaC, automation, and platform engineering patterns

Skills & Experience

Essential

• 5+ years in Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
• Strong experience with AWS (multi-account, networking, security, core services)
• Excellent Terraform skills, building modular and production-grade IaC
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes / EKS or similar orchestration platforms
• Experience with Kafka or other event-streaming technologies
• Hands-on with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD)
• Strong understanding of monitoring, distributed tracing, and observability
• Ability to work autonomously in fast-paced, cloud-native engineering teams

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, payments, or high-throughput distributed systems
• Knowledge of Well-Architected Framework, security engineering, compliance
• Familiarity with service mesh, API gateways, or serverless components
• Exposure to Python/Go/TypeScript for automation or tooling

What This Role is Not

• Not day-to-day ops or support
• Not traditional DevOps or SRE maintenance
• Not basic provisioning or infra monitoring
• Not a junior cloud role

This is a platform build position: architecture + IaC + automation + infrastructure foundations.