Principal Platform Engineer
The company
A Series B-backed Data and AI company building a real-time intelligence platform, already trusted by major financial institutions and moving into public sector work. Growth is real and immediate: a live proof of value with a major financial services provider targeting a January go-live, and a government contract in the pipeline. This is early-stage, well-funded, and scaling fast.
The role
This is a senior, hands-on Platform Engineer hire with a genuine path to Head of Platform as the business grows. You'd join as one of the first dedicated platform hires, taking full ownership of a contractor-run function and bringing it in-house, while helping shape what platform engineering looks like here for the next 18 months and beyond. You'd sit close to the founding team, with real influence over architecture and direction rather than a backlog to work through.
What you'll be doing
- Designing and running AWS-native, event-driven infrastructure (think SQS, Kafka or similar), with Kubernetes, Terraform and modern CI/CD as your toolkit
- Treating latency and scale as first principles: this platform needs to surface new data within minutes, ideally seconds, of it landing
- Owning security and governance in practice: RBAC, secrets management, auditability and access control, working closely with engineering leadership
- Building self-service tooling and golden paths that make life easier for the wider engineering team
- Mentoring engineers and helping define what a platform function looks like as it grows
What we're looking for
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform (or equivalent IaC) and CI/CD pipelines
- Real experience with event-driven or distributed systems, ideally Kafka, SQS or similar
- A solid grasp of security and governance fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, least privilege
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity in an early-stage environment, happy to define things as you go rather than wait for a fully scoped brief
- More important than years of experience: you're hungry, ownership-minded, and want to grow into a leadership seat, not someone looking to coast on what they've already built elsewhere
Nice to have
- Experience in regulated environments (financial services, government, or similar)
- Previous experience leading or mentoring a team
- Eligibility for UK security clearance
How to apply
This search is being run exclusively through Ocho. Get in touch directly with Andrew Harrison for a confidential conversation.