Cloud Platform Engineer (Senior / Lead)

Defaqto; Farringdon; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

Defaqto is seeking a Senior Platform Architect to design and operate a modern multi-cloud platform underpinning engineering, data and product teams in London. You will deliver infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and cost-optimised cloud environments, collaborating with data teams to enable AI-ready workloads, while embedding zero-trust security and SRE practices across the stack.

As a hands-on leader, you will mentor engineers, champion platform engineering standards and ensure robust observability,

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building and operating production cloud infrastructure at senior or lead level.
• Multi-cloud experience across at least two of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud with professional-level certifications.
• Strong automation and IaC skills; GitOps, CI/CD, and cost optimisation.
• Security mindset with zero-trust and secrets management.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate a multi-cloud platform across AWS/Azure/Google and on-prem connections.
• Deliver code-first infrastructure with IaC, GitOps, reusable modules, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Leverage AI agents to automate platform tasks and optimise performance and cost.
• Mentor engineers and set technical direction while enforcing security standards.

Skills

Multi-cloud platform design

Cloud infrastructure

IaC / GitOps

Terraform / OpenTofu

Pulumi

Ansible

Docker / Kubernetes

Security engineering / zero-trust

Python / Go

Observability / SRE basics

Education

Cloud certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Tools

Terraform/OpenTofu

Pulumi

Ansible

Docker

Kubernetes

BigQuery

Job description

Description

Design the Platform Behind Every Product, Data Insight and AI InnovationAs a sole contributor, you'll Lead the design and operation of a modern multi-cloud platform that underpins engineering, data and product teams across the business.

Department: Technology

Location: London

Description

You will:

• Create self-service platforms, golden paths and developer tools that enable teams to ship quickly without managing cloud complexity.
• Build AI-ready infrastructure, guardrails and automation that support both human engineers and autonomous AI agents.
• Champion a zero-trust, secure-by-default approach across identities, networks, workloads and data
• Partner with data teams to optimise cloud data platforms, pipelines and analytics environments that power business-critical insights.

What you'll do

• Design, build and operate our multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud platform across at least two of the top-three providers (AWS, Azure and/or Google Cloud), plus on-prem/hybrid connectivity where needed.
• Build and own an internal developer platform and self-service "golden paths" that make cloud infrastructure feel invisible and commoditised for engineering, data and product teams; and their AI agents.
• Deliver everything as code: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, reusable modules, CI/CD pipelines and policy-as-code guardrails.
• Leverage AI agents extensively to automate and optimise platform work - provisioning, cost and performance optimisation, incident response, remediation and documentation.
• Prepare the infrastructure for AI agents as first-class "engineers": safe machine identities, scoped permissions, sandboxes, approval workflows and audit trails so agents can provision and operate infrastructure within tight guardrails.
• Embed a zero-trust security model across identity, network, workloads and data for both human and machine/agent identities; secure by default, least privilege, secrets management and continuous compliance.
• Apply SRE practices - SLOs/SLIs, observability, capacity planning, resilience and blameless incident management - to keep the platform reliable and cost-efficient.
• Partner with data engineering to design and optimise data pipelines, data stores and large-scale analytics infrastructure such as BigQuery, including query, cost and performance tuning.
• Mentor engineers, set technical direction and champion strong platform and security engineering standards across the organisation.

What you'll need to succeed

Essential requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building and operating production cloud infrastructure at senior or lead level.
• Multi-cloud experience across at least two of the top three providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud), including a recognised professional-level cloud certification for each of those two providers (for example AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Professional, Azure Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Expert, or Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect / DevOps Engineer).
• Strong background in modern hybrid-cloud architecture and connecting cloud with on-prem/edge environments.
• Deep infrastructure-as-code and automation skills (e.g. Terraform/OpenTofu, Pulumi, Ansible), GitOps and CI/CD, plus containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Proven experience building internal developer platforms, self-service golden paths and platform-as-a-product to abstract away cloud complexity for engineering teams.
• Practical experience using AI agents / LLM-based tooling to automate and optimise infrastructure work, and interest in designing infrastructure that AI agents can operate safely.
• Strong security engineering mindset with hands‑on zero‑trust experience across identity, network, workloads and data — including secrets management, least‑privilege IAM and machine/workload identity.
• Solid programming/scripting ability (e.g. Python, Go) and strong observability, reliability and cost‑optimisation practices.

Desirable requirements

• Experience working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with SLOs/SLIs, error budgets and incident management.
• A third top-tier cloud certification, or specialist security/Kubernetes certifications (e.g. CKA/CKS).
• Significant data engineering experience: designing and operating data pipelines and data stores, and optimising databases and large-scale data infrastructure such as BigQuery (including query, cost and performance tuning).
• Experience preparing environments for autonomous/agentic workloads — sandboxes, scoped machine identities, approval workflows and audit trails.
• Experience in a regulated or fintech environment.

Your approach to work

• Pragmatic and hands‑on, with a strong bias for automation and eliminating toil.
• Product mindset — you treat internal engineers (human and AI) as your customers and obsess over their experience.
• Security‑and reliability‑first, collaborative, and comfortable leading and mentoring.

Important to know

Location

We have multiple offices across the UK. We have a new office in London which is becoming more central to where collaborate in person. We have a flexible working policy with a few days per week in the office.

Right to Work

Applicants must already hold a legal right to work in the UK without time restrictions and without the need for future sponsorship. We are unable to provide Skilled Worker visa sponsorship.

Fintel plc and all the businesses within it adopt a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination on any of the protected grounds in the Equality Act 2010.

We are committed to providing equal opportunities to all current and prospective employees regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.

We aspire to have a diverse workforce because, in our view, diversity enables better business outcomes. We also believe that a more inclusive workplace, where people of different backgrounds work together, ensures better outcomes for all staff. From application to interview, we place inclusion at the heart of all we do.