Platform Engineer (AWS / Terraform / Kafka) – Fintech Payments Platform Location : Remote (UK / EU time zones)
Contract : 7 months (to April 2026)
Start : ASAP
Tech Stack : AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes / EKS, Kafka, GitOps, Cloud-Native Tooling
Focus : Platform engineering & solution build (not ops / DevOps)
About the Role
We’re looking for a Platform Engineer to join a major UK retail group building a new Klarna-style fintech payments platform. This role sits at the heart of the cloud platform team and focuses on designing, building, and automating the core infrastructure that powers high-scale financial transactions.
You’ll work in a highly technical environment, collaborating with architects, backend engineers, and security teams to deliver secure, resilient, cloud-native foundations. This is a hands-on build role — not day-to-day ops or DevOps support.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Build & Infrastructure Engineering
Design and implement scalable, resilient cloud platform components in AWS
Own Infrastructure as Code using Terraform (modular, reusable architectures)
Build secure multi-account AWS environments following Well-Architected principles
Develop internal platform tooling, automation, templates, and golden paths
Support EKS / Kubernetes environments and microservice deployment foundations
Event-Driven & Distributed Architecture
Build and support Kafka-based event streaming and messaging capabilities
Ensure high availability, reliability, and idempotent service patterns
Work with engineers to define infrastructure for distributed, real-time systems
Observability, Reliability & Performance
Implement monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing (Datadog / Grafana / ELK)
Ensure SLAs / SLOs for platform components are met
Contribute to disaster recovery design, multi-region readiness, and resilience testing
Security, Governance & Compliance
Enforce best practices for IAM, secrets management, encryption, and network security
Build guardrails, policies, and automated compliance into CI / CD and IaC workflows
Contribute to platform risk assessments and mitigation strategies
Collaboration & Technical Leadership
Partner with architects, platform leads, and product teams to translate requirements into technical designs
Work with developers to guide best practices for cloud-native builds
Mentor engineers in IaC, automation, and platform engineering patterns
Skills & Experience
Essential
5+ years in Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
Strong experience with AWS (multi-account, networking, security, core services)
Excellent Terraform skills, building modular and production-grade IaC
Solid understanding of Kubernetes / EKS or similar orchestration platforms
Experience with Kafka or other event-streaming technologies
Hands-on with CI / CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD)
Strong understanding of monitoring, distributed tracing, and observability
Ability to work autonomously in fast-paced, cloud-native engineering teams
Nice to Have
Experience in fintech, payments, or high-throughput distributed systems
Knowledge of Well-Architected Framework, security engineering, compliance
Familiarity with service mesh, API gateways, or serverless components
Exposure to Python / Go / TypeScript for automation or tooling
What This Role is Not
Not day-to-day ops or support
Not traditional DevOps or SRE maintenance
Not basic provisioning or infra monitoring
Not a junior cloud role
This is a platform build position : architecture + IaC + automation + infrastructure foundations.
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