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.