Senior Payments Platform Engineer

The Role
Were 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 youll 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.

Youll bring deep experience from a neobank payment service provider or financial institution somewhere like Monzo GoCardless Wise Adyen Stripe Revolut or a tier-1 banks payments division where youve had to make cloud infrastructure reliable scalable and compliant under real-world financial constraints.

What Youll Build & Own
As a Payments Platforms Engineer you will design build and operate the cloud and infrastructure layer that underpins our entire payments stack. Youll work closely with our backend payments engineers compliance team and security function to ensure our systems are resilient auditable and production-grade.

You will:

• 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.

Essential:

• 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 youve worked at a neobank (Monzo Revolut Starling N26) a PSP (GoCardless Stripe Adyen Worldpay) or within a banks payments/infrastructure engineering function. You understand the operational and regulatory environment these institutions work in.
• Infrastructure as Code at scale: youve owned and evolved large Terraform (or Pulumi/CDK) codebases not just written modules. Youve 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: youve 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: youve worked inside or adjacent to PCI DSS SOC 2 or FCA/PRA regulated environments and understand the infrastructure obligations this creates.
• On-call maturity: youve 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 Its Like to Work Here

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

Why Join Us
If youve 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. Youll 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)