Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Thought Machine; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Pension plan

Life insurance

Maternity leave

Shared parental leave

25 days holiday

Flexible working hours

Cycle-to-work

Electric car scheme

Season ticket loan

Learning materials

Hobby clubs

Snacks and drinks

Learning culture

Charity days

Weekly food pop-up

Job summary

Thought Machine, a London-based fintech, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to advance its infrastructure platform, spanning orchestration, observability and data. You will build tools and integrations with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud services to support global deployments.

We value deep systems thinking, scalable design, and collaboration with SREs and software engineers. The role offers a generous benefits package and a culture that prizes learning and delivery at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling infrastructure platforms.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong proficiency in producing production-ready tooling using Python or Go.
• Deep understanding of container and orchestration internals (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience extending and integrating open-source tools like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana.

Responsibilities

• Scale the Core Platform: evolve and optimize the cloud-agnostic infrastructure powering Vault globally.
• Simplify Orchestration: build control planes to reduce cognitive load on engineers and SREs.
• Design for Resiliency: engineer fault-tolerant architectures and DR/BCP systems.
• Advance Observability: enhance observability suites for clients with deep monitoring insights.

Skills

Python

Go

Distributed systems

Linux

Cloud-native development

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Job description

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

At Thought Machine, our Senior Software Engineers specialised in Infrastructure play a crucial role in deploying and maintaining our cutting-edge software, developing tools and integrations with third-party infrastructure components used in our customers’ environments. Our team's mission is to abstract away multi-cloud complexity and reduce cognitive load for other developers. We treat our platform infrastructure which spans, orchestration, observability, and data. As a first-class product, enabling our internal teams and global clients to operate securely and reliably at massive scale.

Duties

• Scale the Core Platform: Evolve, scale, and optimise the cloud-agnostic platform infrastructure powering Vault globally.

• Simplify Orchestration: Build intuitive control planes and automation to further abstract away infrastructure complexity, significantly easing the cognitive load for Thought Machine engineers and bank SREs.


• Design for Resiliency: Engineer robust, fault-tolerant architectures and Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning (DR/BCP) systems.


• Advance Observability: Enhance our comprehensive observability suites that are shared across the entire Thought Machine product ecosystem, providing clients with deep, out-of-the-box monitoring and insights


• Optimise Data & Streaming: Scale and optimise core databases and event-streaming platforms to achieve maximum performance and scalability at the lowest cost

Essential

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a similar technical field.


• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling infrastructure platforms (not just maintaining them).


• Strong proficiency in building production-ready platform tooling using Python or Golang.


• Deep understanding of container and orchestration internals (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).


• Hands-on experience extending and integrating open-source tools like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana.


• Proven ability to package and scale developer-facing infrastructure utilities with a focus on improving system reliability.

Desirable

• Experience building cloud-agnostic solutions running across AWS, Azure, and GCP.


• Technical depth in databases or event-streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, DuckDB).


• A deep interest in the internals of infrastructure tools, with a track record of troubleshooting, extending, or optimizing them within a professional environment.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and commission


• Pension plan (match up to 5%)


• Life insurance (3x annual salary)


• Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid)


• Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time)


• 25 days holiday and bank holidays


• Flexible working hours


• Cycle-to-work scheme


• Electric car scheme


• Season ticket loan


• Access to outstanding learning materials and courses


• Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine


• All the latest tech you need


• Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals


• Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks


• A talented and experienced team as your colleagues


• An environment where we encourage learning and progress


• Two charity days a year


• Weekly food pop-up

We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.