Data & ML Platform Lead

Lloyds; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday allowance 22-30 days

Flexible working location & schedule

Family leave up to 63 weeks

Flex cash benefit (4% of basic salary)

Health insurance

Colleague offers & discounts

Financial products; loans & insurance

Share plans up to £45/month

Pension scheme

Job summary

Curve is seeking a Data & ML Platform Lead to head the team building the core infrastructure for Curve’s data and decisioning platform. You will own streaming and batch ingestion, reverse-ETL, real‑time decisioning for fraud and risk, and ML capabilities across the organization.

You will lead a multidisciplinary team, design reliable pipelines, and ensure bank-grade reliability as Curve integrates with Lloyds Banking Group. Expect hands-on platform engineering and architecture challenges.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating real-time services, batch and streaming data pipelines.
• Leadership experience with engineers; ability to set technical direction and develop teams.
• Hands-on in Python; experience with Go or other systems languages is beneficial.
• Experience deploying ML/AI workflows and feature stores in production.
• Strong understanding of operating technology in regulated environments with audit trails.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a multidisciplinary platform engineering team.
• Own design, reliability and scale of Kafka-based decisioning services and data pipelines.
• Ensure bank-grade reliability, auditability and security in cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with Curve and Lloyds Banking Group during integration and transition.

Skills

Data engineering

Platform engineering

Technical leadership

Python programming

Go programming

Regulatory/compliance awareness

ML systems in production

Real-time data processing

Cloud architectures

Observability / SRE

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Airflow

Kafka

Feast

BigQuery

Managed Airflow

Cloud Run

Dataflow

Snowplow

dbt

Job description

As a Data & ML Platform Lead, you will lead the team responsible for building and operating the infrastructure at the core of Curve’s business

You’ll own the platform supporting streaming and batch data ingestion, reverse-ETL, real-time decisioning for fraud and financial crime, and the ML and agentic AI capabilities increasingly used across the organisation

This is a hands‑on platform engineering role where you’ll lead and develop a multidisciplinary team while remaining closely involved in the most complex architectural challenges

You’ll own the design and reliability of Kafka-based decisioning services, data pipelines, orchestration, feature stores and underlying cloud infrastructure, ensuring the platform operates to bank-grade standards of reliability, auditability and scale as Curve integrates into Lloyds Banking Group

Benefits

• A generous holiday allowance: You’ll be eligible for a minimum of 22 days holiday (excluding bank holidays), rising to 30 days based on length of service and grade.
• A flexible way of working: Whether you want flexibility over your location or when you log on, together we can create an approach that works for you and for the business.
• Family leave: Up to 63 weeks of maternity or adoption leave. Statutory maternity or adoption pay is available for 39 weeks, and 20 weeks will be enhanced to the equivalent of full pay. Partners can have six weeks of fully paid paternity leave.
• Flex cash: This is 4% of your basic salary and can be used to spend on the benefits of your choice, or you can choose to take it as a cash top up in your monthly salary.
• Health insurance: Our company funded Private Medical Benefit provides all colleagues with access to good quality medical care, including accommodation, nursing care and specialist advice.
• Colleague Offers: Get discounts on everything from electrical items to cinema tickets and weekly food shopping. You can share this benefit with up to ten family members or friends.
• Financial products: Take advantage of our great financial products, some at a discounted rate, including current accounts, home and car insurance and loans.
• Share plans: Participate in Sharematch and receive matching shares of up to £45 a month from the company, and you can choose to participate in Sharesave, our combined savings and share option plan.
• Pension: We offer a generous pension plan, with all joiners being automatically enrolled in our ‘Your Tomorrow’ scheme. You can decide how much you save and get a say in where your contributions are invested.

If you think all banks are the same, you’re wrong. We’re a pioneering, fast-changing business that’s shaping finance as a force for good. If you’re after a role where you can have an impact and do the best work of your career, you’ve just found itExperience with Terraform, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code

• Experience building and operating real-time services as well as batch and streaming data pipelines
• Experience designing safe deployment approaches including feature flags, shadow modes, staged rollouts and reversible releases
• Strong experience operating orchestration platforms such as Airflow reliably in production
• Deep production experience with streaming technologies, ideally Kafka, and event-driven architectures operating at scale
• A track record of automating manual operational processes and building systems that are scalable, reliable and maintainable
• Significant experience in data engineering, platform engineering or similar roles, including experience leading or providing sustained technical leadership to engineers
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to set technical direction, delegate effectively and develop engineers into owners of the systems they operate
• Experience designing reliable, observable platforms with clear SLAs, monitoring, alerting, load testing and capacity planning
• Strong programming ability in Python and experience with at least one systems language, ideally Go
• Strong understanding of operating technology within regulated environments, including audit trails, control evidencing, change governance and production systems with compliance implications
• Experience deploying and operating ML systems in production, including feature stores, model serving or ML-driven decisioning systems
• Proven experience designing and operating production systems on GCP, including technologies such as BigQuery, Managed Airflow, Cloud Run and Dataflow, or equivalent cloud infrastructure
• Hands‑on experience with Feast
• Experience building or operating LLM and agentic AI workflows in production
• Experience within financial crime, fraud, credit or risk decisioning environments
• Experience integrating technology platforms with large banking organisations or banking vendor ecosystems
• Experience with Snowplow
• Experience supporting dbt from a platform or enablement perspective
• Experience with load‑testing frameworks for data‑intensive systems
• Experience within fintech, financial services, payments or retail banking
• Experience building real‑time decisioning systems with regulatory or financial consequences
• Experience supporting high‑volume transaction platforms as they scale