Platform Engineer

Avance Consulting; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Avance Consulting seeks an experienced Platform Engineering Lead to own a live banking platform on Kubernetes in AWS. You will guide a small team, ensure production readiness, and drive reliability, security, and engineering standards across the programme, security, and vendor interfaces.

You will run the platform end-to-end with AWS, EKS, Terraform and GitOps, enforce policy, create runbooks, and own incident response. Strong architectural judgment is essential.

Qualifications

• Experience leading platform engineering teams in production environments.
• Strong security posture for financial services projects.
• Ability to write and defend architecture decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a small platform engineering team, setting priorities and onboarding.
• Take platform through go-live and manage production readiness, DR, and security.
• Run the platform on AWS, EKS, Terraform, with observability and incident ownership.
• Own vendor connectivity, certificate lifecycle, and identity management.
• Define CI/CD standards and governance with central engineering.
• Coordinate reporting, backlogs, and risk management.

Skills

Leadership & mentoring

Platform reliability

AWS / cloud

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

Security mindset

Architecture ADRs

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

GitOps

Job description

London, UK (4 days office in a week))

Permanent Role

Job Description :

A UK financial institution has built a new banking platform on Kubernetes in AWS. You will lead the small platform engineering team that takes it through go-live and then runs it: you own the platform's reliability, security and engineering standards, and act as the link between the programme, central platform and security teams, and third-party vendors.

What you will do?

• Lead and mentor a small team of platform engineers; set priorities, review designs and PRs, hire and onboard.
• Take the platform live: own production readiness, DR testing, pen-test and vulnerability remediation.
• Run the platform: AWS, EKS, Terraform, GitOps, policy enforcement, messaging and observability, with runbooks and incident ownership.
• Own vendor connectivity and security: private and mTLS integrations, certificate lifecycle and identity, working with vendor technical teams.
• Own architecture decisions: write and defend ADRs at architecture review boards.
• Set CI/CD and promotion standards: audited pipelines and release gates, agreed with central engineering.
• Plan and report: Jira backlog, status reporting, cost estimates; raise risks early.
• Support delivery partners onboarding new services onto the platform.
• Hands-on AWS, Kubernetes/GitOps and Terraform at scale, with team or technical-lead experience.
• Solid grounding in PKI, mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, and network and edge security.
• Experience running production platforms, including DR and incident management.
• Experience writing architecture decisions and presenting them to governance boards.
• CI/CD expertise and a pragmatic approach to controls in a regulated setting.
• Clear communicator across security, architecture and vendor stakeholders.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering.
• Financial services or payments experience.
• Message-broker and observability tooling experience.