Senior Lead Platform Engineer

Insight Global are seeking a Senior Lead Platform Engineer to join the Platform Engineering function of a large, global financial services organisation. This is a senior, hands‐on technical leadership role operating at the intersection of application engineering and infrastructure, supporting a complex, high‐scale engineering estate.

This position requires 3 days onsite in Bromley, UK for a 12‐month contract Inside IR35, converting to a full-time hire upon completion of the contract.

Role Overview

The Senior Lead Platform Engineer will act as a senior technical escalation point across multiple global delivery teams, supporting application, platform, and infrastructure layers. The role focuses on platform reliability, observability, resilience, CI/CD, and cloud adoption, while operating in a high‐pressure, enterprise environment.

This role is not suited to candidates who are solely Java developers or solely DevOps engineers — strong capability across both disciplines is required.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build enterprise‐grade platform and application components aligned to established architecture standards.
• Act as a senior technical escalation point for production and non‐production issues across application, platform, and infrastructure layers.
• Lead incident triage, root cause analysis, and drive long‐term resilience and reliability improvements.
• Design and implement platform‐level monitoring, observability, and performance solutions at scale.
• Own and drive CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, and automation.
• Bridge development and infrastructure teams to ensure smooth delivery and operational handoffs.
• Lead cloud platform adoption, defining runtime standards, platform services, and best practices.
• Provide hands‐on technical leadership and mentoring to engineers across delivery teams.

Must‐Have Requirements Include:

• Strong experience designing and supporting enterprise‐scale platforms and applications in complex environments.
• Hands‐on expertise with Java / J2EE, Spring, Spring Boot, and integration technologies such as Mule and Kafka.
• Experience with SQL and PL/SQL (Oracle) and large‐scale API and microservices architectures (XML/JSON).
• Strong experience with container platforms such as OpenShift and/or Kubernetes.
• Proven experience supporting on‐prem, containerised, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Hands‐on experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tooling.
• Experience administering and using observability tools such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana, or Prometheus.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to support and influence large developer populations in high‐pressure situations.

Plusses Include:

• Experience in a technical leadership or delivery‐focused role.
• Advanced CI/CD tooling and infrastructure automation experience.
• Strong Unix/Linux experience, including shell scripting.
• Advanced networking knowledge (DNS, load balancing, firewalls, proxies).
• Experience working in highly regulated, global enterprise environments.