Senior Platform Engineer

Nala; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

35 Days Off

Birthday Leave

Parental Leave

Global Workspace

Learning Budget

Private Medical Insurance

Life Insurance

Enhanced Pension

Hybrid Working

Monthly Socials

Free Coffee

Job summary

NALA is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own the cloud foundation end-to-end and shape the shared platform layer for both B2B Rafiki and B2C NALA products. You’ll build scalable, secure infrastructure and streamline CI/CD, observability, and incident response.

You will collaborate with product and engineering teams to drive migrations, platform improvements, and faster, reliable releases in a high-velocity environment.

Qualifications

• Extensive production AWS experience at scale.
• Strong infra as code mindset with Terraform.
• Experience deploying containerised workloads (ECS, Docker).
• Familiarity with Kafka, Redis and RDS services.
• Solid understanding of networking, security and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve cloud infrastructure powering NALA and Rafiki for availability, scale, and security.
• Improve developer experience with automation and self-serve tooling.
• Own observability, incident response and reliability practices to reduce downtime.
• Partner with product/engineering to support migrations and platform improvements.
• Strengthen security posture across networks, access controls, secrets, and production envs.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for safe, fast releases.
• Operate production AWS at scale with Terraform and IaC.
• Manage container workloads with ECS and Docker in production.
• Scale infrastructure components like Kafka, Redis, and RDS.
• Communicate clearly with engineers across teams and own infra end-to-end.

Skills

AWS

Terraform

ECS

Docker

Kafka

Redis

RDS

CI/CD

Observability

Incident response

Networking

Security

Distributed systems

Communication

Tools

Docker

ECS

Kafka

Redis

RDS

CI/CD tooling

Terraform

Job description

Senior Platform Engineer NALA•London, England, GB

About Us

NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors , and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 & 2026.

• NALA , our consumer app makes cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
• Rafiki , our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.

Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who’ve scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.

At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.

Own NALA's cloud foundation end-to-end, then architect the shared platform layer that unlocks velocity across both our B2B and B2C products. You'll be the bus-factor fix for our infrastructure, the builder of the connective tissue between Rafiki and NALA, and the person who sets technical direction for how the rest of engineering thinks about systems.

Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Build and improve the cloud infrastructure powering NALA and Rafiki, ensuring high availability, scalability and security across our systems.
• Improve developer experience through automation, self-serve tooling and infrastructure-as-code practices that increase engineering velocity.
• Own and evolve our observability, incident response and reliability practices to minimise downtime and improve system performance.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to support new services, migrations and platform improvements across the business.
• Strengthen our security posture by implementing best practices across networking, access controls, secrets management and production environments.
• Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows to enable safe, fast and reliable releases.
• Production AWS experience at scale, with hands‑on Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong experience managing containerised workloads using ECS and Docker in production environments.
• Strong experience operating and scaling infrastructure components such as Kafka, Redis and managed relational databases like RDS.
• Strong understanding of networking, security, observability and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation in fast-moving engineering teams.
• Comfortable debugging production issues and participating in incident response in high-availability environments.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work closely with software engineers across multiple teams.
• You get excited about owning something end-to-end, from "here's the mess" to "here's how we operate it reliably." You're not treating infra as a stepping stone to architecture — you want to build both.

Nice to have requirements

• Experience working in fintech, payments or other regulated environments.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or self‑serve infrastructure tooling.
• Experience supporting SOC2, ISO27001 or similar compliance initiatives.
• Background in SRE or platform engineering at scale (100+ engineers, 1000+ services).
• Experience designing connective layers or shared infrastructure in multi‑product orgs.

Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Full AWS estate mapped and documented honestly, including gaps and risks.
• CI/CD and observability gaps surfaced, triaged, and prioritized.
• Intake process running: teams have a way to request infra work and get responses.
• Security baseline assessment complete with Head of Security.
• At least one production incident debugged and response process improved as a result.

6-Month Metrics

• Cloud spend understood and trending down (or justified if stable).
• Key services re‑architected for better performance and reliability.
• Measurable improvement in deployment velocity (deploy frequency, time-to-deploy, release safety).
• Incident response faster, more standardized, and partly automated.
• Engineering teams feel less blocked by infrastructure.

You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable.

If successful, you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 stages:

• [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team
• In this stage we want to get to know you a bit more and follow up on your experience and motivations. The best preparation would be to really know why you applied for the role (i.e. your application questions)
• [90 mins] The Practical Assessment
• In this stage, we want to see you in action. You’d be given a snippet of poorly written Terraform code and an architectural problem. Be prepared to whiteboard, debug and review code, along with communicating and discussing the issues you see.
• [45 mins] Bar raiser interview with Markus, Head of Engineering
• The final interview will involve speaking with the Head of Engineering about your motivation for the role and will be a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about the business.

UK / EU / Remote, we have the following benefits:

• 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore (This will be 27 days + 8 Bank Holidays if UK-based)
• Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
• Enhanced Parental Leave: We offer 16 weeks of full pay for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks of full pay for the secondary caregiver (After your probationary period)
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.

For people who come to our London office;

• Private Medical Insurance: Full medical cover through a leading UK provider, because your health comes first.
• Life Insurance: 3x salary cover, giving you and your family peace of mind.
• Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future! (Applies to UK)
• Hybrid Working: We work in our Canary Wharf Office four days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday).
• Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch focused on building great working relationships with the team.
• Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times.
• Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.