Head of Platform Engineering

Elavon; London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial technology company seeks a Head of Platform Engineering to drive the design and evolution of their payment gateway products. This pivotal role emphasizes platform strategy, team leadership, and operational excellence within a hybrid working environment. The ideal candidate will possess extensive experience with AWS and cloud-native platforms, demonstrating leadership in engineering teams while ensuring compliance and reliability in platform services.

Benefits

Development resources for career growth

Benefits for health and financial security

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of cloud-native platforms and infrastructure-as-code.
• Proven ability to lead high-performing engineering teams.
• Clear communication skills for engaging technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of platform capabilities.
• Define and execute platform engineering strategy.
• Oversee the platform architecture and operations.

Skills

AWS

Leadership

Platform Engineering Expertise

Collaboration

Operational Excellence

Strategic Thinking

Communication

Containerization & Kubernetes

Job description

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions, enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed in the right ways, all more confidently and more often—that’s what we call the courage to thrive. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, Elavon is committed to building the platforms and ecosystems that help over 1.5 million customers around the world to achieve their financial goals—no matter what they need. From transaction processing to customer service, to driving innovation and launching new products, we’re building a range of tailored payment solutions powered by the latest technology. As part of our team, you can explore what motivates and energizes your career goals: partnering with our customers, our communities, and each other.

Job Description Head of Platform Engineering Job Summary

The Head of Platform Engineering at Elavon will lead the design, delivery, and evolution of platform capabilities that underpin our payment gateway products, including EPG, CPI, Opayo, and Salucro.

This role is pivotal in enabling developer productivity, ensuring platform scalability and security, and aligning platform services with Elavon’s business and regulatory priorities. The successful candidate will drive platform strategy, foster engineering excellence, and champion a culture of automation, observability, and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Strategy & Vision

Define and execute a platform engineering strategy that supports Elavon’s multi-product architecture and aligns with US Bank’s cloud and compliance frameworks.

• Team Leadership

Lead and mentor a distributed platform engineering team, fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and collaboration across London and US-based teams.

• Platform Architecture & Operations

Oversee the design and operation of Elavon’s internal platforms, including AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, and developer experience capabilities.

• Developer Enablement

Reduce cognitive load for product teams by delivering reusable, secure, and scalable platform components that accelerate delivery and improve reliability.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with product, security, compliance, and infrastructure teams across Elavon and US Bank to ensure platform alignment and integration.

• Reliability & Quality

Embed SRE principles into platform operations, ensuring high availability, robust incident management, and continuous feedback loops with development teams.

• Compliance & Governance

Ensure platform services meet regulatory and security requirements, including those mandated by US Bank and payment industry standards.

Essential Skills

• Leadership

Proven ability to lead high-performing engineering teams and influence cross-functional stakeholders.

• Platform Engineering Expertise

Deep experience with cloud-native platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and platform-as-a-product thinking.

• Strategic Thinking

Ability to align platform capabilities with business outcomes and long-term technology roadmaps.

• Operational Excellence

Strong understanding of observability, incident response, and platform reliability engineering.

• Communication

Clear communicator who can engage technical and non-technical audiences across global teams.

• Collaboration

Experience working across organisational boundaries, including with central cloud, database, and security teams.

• AWS

Deep familiarity with AWS and multi-region setups.

• Containerization & Kubernetes

Experience deploying and managing containerized workloads at scale.

Desirable Skills

• Payment Gateways

Understanding of payment gateway architecture.

• Developer Experience

Experience working closely with product teams with a view on increasing development productivity via platform enablers.

Location

The role offers a hybrid / flexible schedule, which means there's an in-office expectation of 3 or more days per week and the flexibility to work outside the office location for the other days.

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants .

Benefits:

We offer an exciting, fast-paced and diverse working environment with employees of many different nationalities. We provide benefits to help you protect your health and financial security; and give you peace of mind. We also invest in your career growth with development resources that give you the opportunity to stretch and shine.

Posting may be closed earlier due to high volume of applicants.