Senior Payments Platform Engineer

The Role We're looking for a Senior Payments Platforms Engineer to own and scale the infrastructure backbone that powers our fiat crypto payment flows. This is not a pure DevOps or SRE role, you'll be a senior technical contributor who designs cloud-native platforms, defines engineering standards, and directly enables the product and engineering teams shipping the next generation of our payment infrastructure. You'll bring deep experience from a neobank, payment service provider, or financial institution — somewhere like Monzo, GoCardless, Wise, Checkout.com , Adyen, Stripe, Revolut, or a tier-1 bank's payments division, where you've had to make cloud infrastructure reliable, scalable, and compliant under real-world financial constraints. What You'll Build & Own As a Payments Platforms Engineer, you will design, build, and operate the cloud and infrastructure layer that underpins our entire payments stack. You'll work closely with our backend payments engineers, compliance team, and security function to ensure our systems are resilient, auditable, and production-grade. You will: Architect and operate our AWS-based payments infrastructure — multi-region, highly available, and designed with financial-grade resilience (active-active or active-passive failover, RTO/RPO commitments, disaster recovery runbooks). Own our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) estate using Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK — full lifecycle management of AWS resources including VPCs, EKS/ECS clusters, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, and API Gateway. Design and enforce network security architecture for a regulated payments environment: private subnets, VPC peering/PrivateLink for third-party integrations (Plaid, Stripe, Chainalysis, etc.), WAF rules, Shield Advanced, and robust ingress/egress controls. Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support safe, high-frequency production deployments across our payment services — including blue/green and canary releases, automated rollback, and deployment gating tied to SLO compliance. Define and operate our secrets and key management strategy — AWS KMS, Secrets Manager, HSM integration where required for PCI DSS scope, and robust secret rotation practices. Own observability infrastructure — centralised logging (CloudWatch, OpenSearch or equivalent), distributed tracing (AWS X-Ray or OpenTelemetry), metrics pipelines, and alerting that surfaces real payment failures, latency spikes, and compliance-relevant anomalies to on-call engineers. Platform compliance and audit readiness — design infrastructure controls that satisfy PCI DSS, SOC 2, and relevant FCA/regulatory expectations: immutable audit logs, access controls, data residency, encryption at rest and in transit, and evidence generation for auditors. Manage data platform infrastructure for our payments data — RDS Aurora PostgreSQL (primary OLTP, event streaming MSK/Kafka or Kinesis), and integration with any analytical stores used for reconciliation and reporting. Build reliability tooling — SLO/SLA dashboards, automated runbooks, chaos engineering experiments, and load/stress test harnesses for critical payment paths. Own disaster recovery and backup strategy — design and test multi-region failover, define RTO/RPO targets per service tier, build automated backup pipelines, and maintain runbooks for full and partial recovery scenarios. Ensure business continuity is provable, not assumed. Drive platform cost engineering — rightsizing, Reserved/Savings Plans, Spot strategy for non-payment-critical workloads, and tagging taxonomy for financial allocation across products. Support and mentor backend engineers on platform best practices — container packaging, 12-factor apps, environment parity, and safe use of managed AWS services. Who You Are This is a role for a senior engineer who has built and operated payments or financial services infrastructure at scale, someone who understands that downtime in payments has real financial and regulatory consequences. Essential: Deep AWS expertise — hands-on production experience across the core compute, networking, storage, messaging, and security services. AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, SysOps Administrator) are a positive signal but not required. Payments or financial services background, you've worked at a neobank (Monzo, Revolut, Starling, N26), a PSP (GoCardless, Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com , Worldpay), or within a bank's payments/infrastructure engineering function. You understand the operational and regulatory environment these institutions work in. Infrastructure as Code at scale: you've owned and evolved large Terraform (or Pulumi/CDK) codebases, not just written modules. You've handled state management, environment promotion, and IaC testing patterns in a team setting. Container orchestration, strong Kubernetes (EKS preferred) or ECS production experience: cluster operations, pod security, autoscaling, service mesh basics (Istio/App Mesh or equivalent). Database platform knowledge: you've run RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL at scale for transactional workloads, understand replication, read replica routing, connection pooling (PgBouncer/RDS Proxy), and know when to reach for other data stores. Event streaming and async infrastructure: production experience operating Kafka (MSK) or Kinesis for financial event pipelines, including consumer group management, offset management, and dead-letter handling. Security and compliance: you've worked inside or adjacent to PCI DSS, SOC 2, or FCA/PRA regulated environments and understand the infrastructure obligations this creates. On-call maturity: you've been in an on-call rotation for a 24/7 financial system and have written and iterated on runbooks, incident response processes, and post-mortems. Nice to Have: Experience with multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic platform layers in addition to AWS. Platform engineering or developer experience (DevEx) focus — internal tooling, golden paths, and self-service infrastructure. Experience with Solana or EVM blockchain infrastructure (nodes, RPC endpoints, validator operations). Hands-on experience with a policy-as-code tool (OPA, Sentinel) for guardrails on infrastructure provisioning. FinOps certification or deep cost engineering background in a high-throughput payments environment. Experience with HSMs or dedicated key management hardware for PCI-scoped systems. Strong scripting/automation background in Python, Go, or Rust for tooling and platform utilities. Crypto/web3 infrastructure experience — running nodes, managing hot/cold wallet infrastructure. The Stack (Current & Target) Cloud: AWS (primary) — EC2, EKS, ECS, RDS Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, MSK Kafka, SQS, SNS, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, WAF, Shield IaC: Terraform CI/CD: GitHub Actions Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS) Observability: OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, Grafana/Prometheus Languages (platform tooling): Rust, Python, Bash Blockchain: Solana (programs, RPC nodes, wallet infrastructure) What It's Like to Work Here We work in person (London) The pace is intense Expectations are high and impact is immediate Why Join Us? If you've spent years making payments infrastructure dependable at a bank, neobank, or PSP and you want to apply that rigour to a product growing faster than almost anything else in fintech — this is the role. You'll have real ownership, none of the corporate inertia, and a direct line between the infrastructure you build and the hundreds of thousands of users it serves every day. Compensation & Package Base Salary + Equity/Tokens / $450k Liquid comp Interview Process Recruiter / HR Call > Founder / CEO Interview > Technical Interview 1 >Technical Interview 2 (CTO)