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Allica Bank is the UK's fastest-growing fintech firm, focused on serving established SMEs—a major underserved segment representing over a third of the UK economy.
The Platform Engineering team is the centralised function that builds, provisions, and operates the infrastructure that all other engineering teams depend on. This role is for a Lead Platform Engineer who will own a core domain of Allica's platform, setting its technical direction and taking accountability for production behaviour while remaining hands-on in implementation.
You will spend a significant portion of your week in infrastructure as code, pipelines, and live systems, with the remainder spent setting standards, reviewing designs, and making high-consequence technical decisions. Your customers are internal product and data engineering teams; adoption and friction reduction are your key success measures.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own the architecture of Allica's Azure cloud platform: landing zones, subscriptions, network topology, container runtime, and integration/resilience patterns. Design against Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework as working disciplines.
- Build reusable core infrastructure: Terraform modules, deployment templates, and platform services enabling teams to stand up production-grade infrastructure without reinventing security, networking, and observability.
- Deliver and manage all infrastructure through Terraform and secure CI/CD, driving manual change and configuration drift toward zero. Set and evolve engineering standards for code quality, peer review, policy as code, and release management.
- Embed security, governance, and compliance throughout the platform lifecycle. Collaborate with Security, Engineering, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure platforms meet organisational, regulatory, and control requirements with clear documentation and auditable evidence.
- Own availability, reliability, and run cost for the platform, backed by service objectives and tested recovery arrangements. Lead complex incident response, own root-cause analysis, and drive out repeat causes.
- Use service data, operational experience, and FinOps practices to continuously improve platform automation, resilience, engineering standards, cost visibility, and resource optimisation.
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of platform engineers while remaining personally hands-on in architecture, design reviews, and the hardest technical problems. Set and raise the technical bar through coaching and example.
Required Experience:
- Strong track record architecting and running production Azure environments at scale.
- Fluency in landing zone and subscription design, private networking, containerised compute, API management, and resilience patterns across zones and regions.
- Extensive hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure at scale, infrastructure as code, containerised runtimes, identity, and observability.
- Demonstrated production accountability for systems that matter; comfortable handling incidents.
- Treats developer experience as a product; engages with engineering teams to design for adoption rather than mandate.
- Treats regulatory and security requirements as engineering constraints to design around, not obstacles to circumvent.
- Prefers boring, well-understood solutions unless the problem genuinely demands otherwise; willing to remove things.
Desirable Experience:
- Architecture or engineering experience with Google Cloud Platform.
- Experience in complex, regulated, or security-sensitive environments.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, serverless services, and cloud-native application patterns.
- Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or comparable CI/CD technologies.
- Familiarity with FinOps, operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and cloud-control frameworks.
- Relevant Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform, security, or architecture certifications.
Allica Bank offers flexible and hybrid working, full onboarding and development support, pension contributions, discretionary bonus, private health cover, life assurance, and family-friendly policies.
