Platform Engineering Lead/Platform Architect

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

Job summary

Falconsmartit is seeking a Platform Engineering Lead/Platform Architect in London to own and guide a Kubernetes-based banking platform hosted on AWS. You will lead a small engineering team through go-live and into steady operations, ensuring reliability, security and engineering standards across the platform.

The role focuses on production readiness, vendor governance, and architecture decisions, with a hybrid onsite work pattern and close collaboration with security and delivery partners.

Qualifications

• Hands-on AWS, Kubernetes at scale with team or tech-lead experience.
• Strong PKI, mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, and network security knowledge.
• Experience running production platforms including DR and incident management.
• Ability to document decisions and present to governance boards.
• CI/CD and controls in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a small platform team; prioritize, review designs, hire and onboard.
• Take the platform live: production readiness, DR testing, vulnerability remediation.
• Operate the AWS/EKS/Terraform based platform with GitOps, observability and incident ownership.
• Manage vendor connectivity, certificate lifecycle and identity management.
• Make architecture decisions and defend ADRs at governance boards.
• Define CI/CD standards with central engineering and release gates.
• Plan and report progress, manage backlog and cost estimates.

Skills

AWS Kubernetes

Terraform

PKI & mTLS

CI/CD

Security governance

Communication

AI-assisted engineering

Job description

Job Title: Platform Engineering Lead/Platform Architect

Job Location: London (Hybrid - 4 days onsite)

Job Type: FTE

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.

Essential

• 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.

Desirable

• Financial services or payments experience.
• Message-broker and observability tooling experience.
• Experience with SaaS banking vendors.