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.