Platform Engineer
Platform Engineer (Contract)
📍 Canary Wharf, London (Hybrid – 2 days onsite)
💼 Initial 6-month contract (likely to extend)
💰 £650–£725 per day
🏦 Financial services experience preferred
Overview
A leading, PE-backed technology platform is undergoing a large-scale 12-month transformation programme to modernise its architecture and engineering capabilities.
We are looking for a Platform Engineer to play a key role in building the foundational components that will enable this transformation. You will work closely with architecture leadership to deliver scalable, production-ready platform solutions and accelerate engineering delivery.
Role Purpose
- Build core platform capabilities aligned to the target architecture
- Deliver working reference implementations to guide engineering teams
- Accelerate delivery by unblocking critical platform dependencies
Key Responsibilities
🔹 Platform Infrastructure
- Design and implement API gateway architecture (e.g. Kong or equivalent)
- Build observability and health monitoring capabilities (progressive maturity)
- Develop environment standardisation and templating
- Standardise CI/CD pipelines and deployment patterns
🔹 Architectural Enablement
- Implement event-driven architecture using Kafka
- Build authentication and authorisation patterns (e.g. Keycloak or similar)
- Develop reference implementations for architectural standards
- Support multi-region / active-active architecture design
🔹 Delivery Acceleration
- Execute platform engineering backlog aligned to architectural priorities
- Build shared services and environments to unblock product teams
- Demonstrate best practices through working code, not documentation
Required Skills
Essential
- 5+ years’ experience in platform or infrastructure engineering
- Strong experience with:
- Kafka (messaging design and implementation)
- API gateways (Kong or equivalent)
- Kubernetes / containerised environments
- Private cloud or on-prem infrastructure
- CI/CD pipeline design and implementation
- Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform)
Strongly Preferred
- AWS (as a secondary cloud platform)
- Identity and access tools (e.g. Keycloak or similar)
- Experience within product-led or SaaS transformation programmes
- Familiarity with Spring Boot ecosystems
- Experience with multi-region / active-active architectures
Nice to Have
- Experience within financial or investment services
- Exposure to document generation or structured data platforms