Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer (AWS / Terraform / Kafka) – Fintech Payments Platform Location: Remote (UK/EU time zones) Contract: 7 months (to April 2026) Start: ASAP Tech Stack: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Kafka, GitOps, Cloud-Native Tooling Focus: Platform engineering & solution build (not ops/DevOps) About the Role We're looking for a Platform Engineer to join a major UK retail group building a new Klarna-style fintech payments platform. This role sits at the heart of the cloud platform team and focuses on designing, building, and automating the core infrastructure that powers high-scale financial transactions. You'll work in a highly technical environment, collaborating with architects, backend engineers, and security teams to deliver secure, resilient, cloud-native foundations. This is a hands-on build role — not day-to-day ops or DevOps support. Key Responsibilities Platform Build & Infrastructure Engineering Design and implement scalable, resilient cloud platform components in AWS Own Infrastructure as Code using Terraform (modular, reusable architectures) Build secure multi-account AWS environments following Well-Architected principles Develop internal platform tooling, automation, templates, and golden paths Support EKS/Kubernetes environments and microservice deployment foundations Event-Driven & Distributed Architecture Build and support Kafka-based event streaming and messaging capabilities Ensure high availability, reliability, and idempotent service patterns Work with engineers to define infrastructure for distributed, real-time systems Observability, Reliability & Performance Implement monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing (Datadog/Grafana/ELK) Ensure SLAs/SLOs for platform components are met Contribute to disaster recovery design, multi-region readiness, and resilience testing Security, Governance & Compliance Enforce best practices for IAM, secrets management, encryption, and network security Build guardrails, policies, and automated compliance into CI/CD and IaC workflows Contribute to platform risk assessments and mitigation strategies Collaboration & Technical Leadership Partner with architects, platform leads, and product teams to translate requirements into technical designs Work with developers to guide best practices for cloud-native builds Mentor engineers in IaC, automation, and platform engineering patterns Skills & Experience Essential 5+ years in Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering Strong experience with AWS (multi-account, networking, security, core services) Excellent Terraform skills, building modular and production-grade IaC Solid understanding of Kubernetes / EKS or similar orchestration platforms Experience with Kafka or other event-streaming technologies Hands-on with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD) Strong understanding of monitoring, distributed tracing, and observability Ability to work autonomously in fast-paced, cloud-native engineering teams Nice to Have Experience in fintech, payments, or high-throughput distributed systems Knowledge of Well-Architected Framework, security engineering, compliance Familiarity with service mesh, API gateways, or serverless components Exposure to Python/Go/TypeScript for automation or tooling What This Role is Not Not day-to-day ops or support Not traditional DevOps or SRE maintenance Not basic provisioning or infra monitoring Not a junior cloud role This is a platform build position: architecture + IaC + automation + infrastructure foundations.