Platform Engineer

A highly technical engineering firm is looking for a Platform Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure underpinning its real-time production systems.

The business builds high-performance systems that operate continuously, where infrastructure performance, reliability and speed of delivery have a direct impact on commercial outcomes. The engineering environment is fast-moving, with new systems and features often shipped in days rather than months.

This is not a traditional DevOps role focused on maintaining an established platform. The infrastructure function is still relatively early, giving you the opportunity to identify problems, set direction and build the systems, tooling and processes that the wider engineering team relies on.

You’ll work across production infrastructure, Linux performance, observability, deployments, developer experience and internal tooling, with significant freedom to decide what needs improving and take ownership of delivering it.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve infrastructure supporting real-time, 24/7 production systems


• Build reliable deployment, rollback and operational workflows


• Improve observability across metrics, logging, dashboards, tracing and alerting


• Develop tooling and automation that allows engineers to ship faster and more safely


• Improve CI/CD, build processes, test environments and configuration workflows


• Work at the Linux and infrastructure level to improve performance, reliability and latency


• Investigate areas such as networking behaviour, CPU utilisation, resource contention and host-level performance


• Automate repetitive operational processes and remove engineering bottlenecks


• Build internal tools used across the wider engineering team


• Contribute to infrastructure security, access controls, secrets management and system hardening


• Identify infrastructure problems independently and own improvements from idea through to production

Requirements

• Strong experience building, running and automating production infrastructure


• Good knowledge of cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS


• Strong Linux fundamentals and an interest in understanding systems below the surface


• Experience with infrastructure automation and CI/CD


• Experience improving the reliability and observability of production systems


• Strong examples of projects or systems you have personally owned and delivered


• Comfortable working in an environment where problems may initially be loosely defined


• Able to move quickly, make pragmatic technical decisions and take ownership without relying on a backlog of tickets


• An engineering mindset focused on simplifying systems and improving how other developers work


• Experience with Terraform and Ansible


• Experience with high-performance, real-time or latency-sensitive systems


• Background in trading, market making, HFT or another performance-critical engineering environment


• Experience operating systems that need to run reliably 24/7


• Experience with bare-metal or hybrid cloud infrastructure


• Experience building developer tooling or internal platforms


• Exposure to blockchain, Ethereum or distributed systems

You do not need to come from a trading or blockchain background. Engineers from technically demanding startups, infrastructure businesses and other environments where reliability, performance and speed matter are equally relevant.

The key is being able to demonstrate what you have personally built, owned and improved. This is an opportunity to join a small, highly technical engineering environment where platform engineers have significant leverage. Rather than maintaining mature infrastructure, you’ll have the freedom to shape how the platform operates and build systems that directly improve the output of the wider engineering team.

The role offers a base salary of up to £200,000, alongside a significant performance-related bonus, equity, and autonomous technical ownership.