Platform Engineer

Stanford Black Limited; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Stanford Black Limited is seeking an Engineering Lead for Platform Engineering within a fintech context backed by a major financial institution. You will guide a high-performing squad, shape strategy, and drive scale across the organisation’s engineering platforms.

The role focuses on reliability, automation, and developer tooling, with a strong emphasis on AI-assisted engineering governance and security. You will partner with senior leadership to deliver strategic platform initiatives and

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading engineers and building high-performing teams.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures and Kubernetes.
• Ability to evaluate architectural decisions and balance short- and long-term outcomes.
• Experience operating production systems and leading through incidents.
• Strong stakeholder management across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience implementing AI-enabled engineering practices with governance, validation and security.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Building and leading a high-performing platform engineering team, helping great engineers become even better.
• Owning platform initiatives from strategy and roadmap through to delivery and production operations.
• Setting the engineering standard across reliability, automation, infrastructure and software quality.
• Partnering with senior leadership to define long-term platform strategy and technical direction.
• Driving a strong ownership culture, where teams build, run and continuously improve what they ship.
• Navigating architectural trade-offs across multiple engineering groups and driving alignment.
• Leading the adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices with governance and measurable outcomes.

Skills

Leadership

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes

Incident management

AI-assisted engineering

Stakeholder management

Tools

Terraform

Crossplane

AWS

Job description

Engineering Lead | Platform Engineering | Fintech Backed by a Global Banking Titan

We're exclusively partnered with a newly launched fintech backed by one of the world's largest financial institutions, building a modern digital platform expected to serve more than 80 million customers globally.

This is a rare opportunity to join during the foundational stage, where the decisions made today will shape how the business engineers, deploys and operates technology for years to come.

They're looking for an Engineering Lead who can combine technical depth, engineering leadership, and strategic thinking to build the foundations that every engineering team relies upon.

You’ll lead a high-performing platform engineering squad, influence technical strategy alongside senior leadership, and help define how platform engineering scales across the entire organisation.

Build the platform that powers everything else

The team sits at the heart of engineering.

Their work enables hundreds of engineers to move faster, deploy safely, and operate reliably at scale. From cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platforms to developer tooling, automation and AI-assisted engineering, you’ll help shape the environment in which every engineering team operates.

What you'll be doing

• Building and leading a high-performing platform engineering team, helping great engineers become even better
• Owning platform initiatives from strategy and roadmap through to delivery and production operations
• Setting the engineering standard across reliability, automation, infrastructure and software quality
• Partnering with senior leadership to define long-term platform strategy and technical direction
• Driving a strong ownership culture, where teams build, run and continuously improve what they ship
• Navigating architectural trade-offs across multiple engineering groups and driving alignment
• Leading the adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices with clear governance, measurable outcomes and strong engineering principles

What we're looking for

• A proven track record of leading engineers and developing high-performing teams
• Strong technical foundations across distributed systems, cloud-native architectures and Kubernetes
• The ability to evaluate complex architectural decisions and balance short and long-term outcomes
• Experience operating critical production systems and leading through incidents
• Strong stakeholder management skills with credibility across both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience implementing or scaling AI-enabled engineering practices with a pragmatic view on governance, validation and security
• 10+ years of software engineering experience

Nice to have

• AWS or GCP experience
• Infrastructure-as-Code exposure, particularly Terraform or Crossplane
• Experience within fintech, banking or other regulated environments
• Background in platform engineering, internal developer platforms or developer experience

Why this opportunity stands out

• Influence platform engineering at the earliest stage of a large-scale greenfield build
• Help shape technology that will ultimately support over 80 million customers worldwide
• Direct access to senior decision-makers and genuine influence over technical direction
• Build and grow a high-performing engineering organisation around you
• Play a key role in defining how a major financial institution adopts AI-assisted engineering
• Modern technologies, strong engineering culture, and meaningful investment in people and platform capability