Lead Platform Engineer - Azure & GCP (Hybrid)

Next Ventures; Slough; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Next Ventures is seeking a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer with strong cloud architecture capability to accelerate a major cloud transformation and application modernisation programme within a regulated banking environment.

Location: Canary Wharf or Liverpool Street, London (Hybrid - 3 days onsite). The role suits a senior platform engineer stepping into architectural responsibilities or a junior architect who remains hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Define target architectures for modernization and scalable platform adoption.
• Develop Azure/GCP reference patterns, standards, and reusable platform components.
• Align platform capabilities with regulatory, operational, and business requirements.
• Provide architectural direction while remaining hands-on in engineering delivery.
• Assess legacy workloads and define modernisation paths: Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Cloud-native transformation.
• Enable adoption of PaaS/SaaS aligned with the target operating model.
• Partner with engineering teams to modernise applications using cloud-native services.
• Build secure, scalable Azure and GCP cloud platforms.
• Drive IaC adoption using Terraform and cloud-native tooling.
• Implement automation, CI/CD, observability, and reliability engineering practices.
• Define standards for networking, identity, security, monitoring, and resilience.
• Improve developer experience through platform consistency, automation, and self-service.
• Ensure platform and workloads comply with banking regulatory requirements.
• Embed secure-by-design principles into platform foundations.
• Define and enforce controls for Identity & Access Management, Encryption & data protection, Network segmentation, Disaster recovery, Operational resilience.
• Guide engineering teams through cloud adoption and modernisation.
• Present platform designs and architectural recommendations to governance boards.
• Collaborate with development, platform, infrastructure, and security teams.

Job description

Next Ventures is seeking a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer with strong cloud architecture capability to accelerate a major cloud transformation and application modernisation programme within a regulated banking environment.

Location: Canary Wharf or Liverpool Street, London (Hybrid - 3 days onsite). The role suits a senior platform engineer stepping into architectural responsibilities or a junior architect who remains hands-on.