Lead Engineer

UK Engineering and SRE Lead

Location: London (Hybrid)

Salary: Up to £85,000 + benefits

Shape the Future of Fintech Infrastructure in the UK

If you’re passionate about designing cloud-native platforms, enabling high-throughput, low-latency systems, and ensuring flawless reliability, this is your opportunity to make a tangible impact in the UK fintech ecosystem.

About the Role

As the UK Engineering and SRE Lead (Backend) , you’ll own the performance, scalability, and operational resilience of our UK backend systems — including payment gateways, settlement, fraud monitoring, datalake, and core banking services.

You’ll combine deep backend engineering expertise with a strong Site Reliability Engineering mindset, leading a hybrid team of software, DevOps, and SRE engineers. This role blends architecture, leadership, and hands-on delivery — you’ll design systems that scale and perform flawlessly, automate everything you can, and guide your team through both innovation and incident.

What You’ll Do

• Lead end-to-end development and deployment of mission-critical backend systems, targeting 99.999% availability.
• Architect and deliver high-throughput, cloud-native services using Java/Spring Boot , Node.js , and Python across AWS and Kubernetes environments.
• Implement event-driven architectures using Kafka, RabbitMQ, and AWS services (SNS, SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB).
• Drive automation across CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions , Terraform , and Argo CD for seamless and secure deployments.
• Enhance observability using Prometheus , Grafana , Datadog , and CloudWatch , enabling proactive incident prevention.
• Own incident management and post-mortem practices — guiding the team through challenges calmly and driving meaningful improvement.
• Collaborate with global engineering and product teams to align architectural standards and deliver strategic initiatives.
• Embed regulatory and operational resilience requirements (GDPR, PCI-DSS, Outsourcing, Incident Response) into every layer of delivery.
• Mentor and coach engineers to build a strong, reliable, and forward-looking backend function.

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering , SRE , or cloud platform design , ideally within banking, fintech, or e-commerce domains.
• Proven track record designing and delivering microservice architectures and API ecosystems using Spring Boot , Node.js , and Python .
• Deep technical expertise across AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, VPC, PrivateLink, CloudWatch, KMS, Aurora) and Kubernetes (Helm, Terraform, Argo CD).
• Experience with API Gateways such as Kong , ApigeeX , or Istio — including configuration of mTLS, OAuth2, OIDC, and JWT validation.
• Strong command of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Harness).
• Familiarity with messaging, caching, and database systems — Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL.
• Hands-on experience in monitoring, observability, and incident response frameworks using modern tooling.
• Strong leadership, mentoring, and stakeholder management skills — able to scale teams, set OKRs, and foster engineering excellence.
• An ability to remain composed, analytical, and decisive in high-pressure, production-critical scenarios.

Desirable Experience

• Deep understanding of payments systems , settlement flows , and transaction risk monitoring .
• Proven ability to deliver platform migrations or Open Banking integrations.
• Cross-cloud exposure (AWS and GCP).
• Experience integrating identity and access management systems (e.g. Ping Identity, OAuth2 frameworks).
• Experience leading initiatives in regulated environments or supporting compliance with operational resilience standards.

Who You Are

• A pragmatic leader — capable of balancing strategic direction with hands-on engineering.
• Calm, structured, and composed during incidents or time-critical challenges.
• Technically curious, collaborative, and humble, with a passion for mentoring and empowering engineers.
• Committed to quality, reliability, and doing things the right way.
• Excited by the opportunity to build something lasting from the ground up in the UK fintech space..