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