Lead Platform Engineer

About Allica Bank

Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company - and the fastest-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech.

Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities - representing over a third of our economy - yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers.

Department Description

Platform Engineering is the centralised team that builds, provisions and runs the infrastructure every other engineering team at Allica depends on. Whether a product serves a business banking customer or a colleague inside the bank, it lands on a platform this team designed. The team owns both halves of that, building the platform and running it, against the availability and resilience standards a regulated bank is held to. Well-architected is the operating standard, not an aspiration: reliability, security, cost and operational excellence are design inputs from the start.

The job is to make the right thing the easy thing, through paved roads, self-service provisioning, sensible defaults, and controls encoded in the platform rather than bolted on afterwards. Every control the platform enforces is one a product team does not have to think about, and one we can evidence on demand. Role Description The Lead Platform Engineer is the senior technical leader for a core domain of Allica's platform. You set its technical direction, you are accountable for how it behaves in production, and you build it yourself.

This is a hands-on role. Expect to spend a real share of your week in infrastructure as code, pipelines and live systems, and the rest setting standards, reviewing designs and making the calls that are too consequential to delegate. Your customers are internal. Product engineering and data engineering choose whether to use what you build, so adoption and the friction you remove are the measures that matter.

Principal Accountabilities

Platform Architecture and Engineering

• Own the architecture of Allica’s Cloud platform: landing zones, subscriptions and network topology, container runtime, and the integration and resilience patterns that sit on top. Design again Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework as working disciplines. 

• Build the reusable core: Terraform modules, deployment templates and platform services that let a team stand up production-grade infrastructure without reinventing the security, networking and observability plumbing each time.

  Infrastructure as Code and Automation 

• Deliver and manage all infrastructure through Terraform and secure CI/CD, so that every change is automated, repeatable, version-controlled, tested, and reversible. Drive manual change and configuration drift towards zero. 

• Set and evolve engineering standards for the function: code quality, peer review, policy as code and, release management.

  Security, Governance, and Compliance 

• Embed security, governance, and compliance throughout the platform lifecycle, implementing effective policies, access controls, encryption, vulnerability management, monitoring, and configuration standards. 

• Collaborate with Allica’s Security, Engineering, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure platforms meet organisational, regulatory, and control requirements, supported by clear documentation and auditable evidence. 

• Identify and manage architectural risks, security vulnerabilities, control gaps, and technical debt, ensuring remediation actions are prioritised, tracked, and completed.

  Platform Operations and Service Ownership 

• Own availability, reliability, and run cost for the platform, backed by service objectives, monitoring you can operate from, and tested recovery arrangements.

• Lead the response to complex incidents, own the root-cause analysis, drive out repeat causes rather than repeat fixes. 

• Use service data, operational experience, and FinOps practices to continuously improve platform automation, resilience, engineering standards, cost visibility, forecasting, and resource optimisation.

  Team Leadership 

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of platform engineers while remaining personally hands-on in architecture, design reviews, and the hardest technical problems. 

• Set the technical bar and raise it, through coaching, design review and the example of your own work.

  Personal Attributes & Experience 

• A strong track record architecting, and running production Azure environments at scale.

• Fluent in landing zone and subscription design, private networking, containerised compute, API management and resilience patterns across zones and regions.

• Line Management Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure at scale, infrastructure as code, containerised runtimes, identity and observability. 

• Has carried production accountability for systems that matter. Comfortable in handling incidents. 

• Treats developer experience as a product.

• Talks to engineering teams, watches how they actually work and designs for adoption rather than mandate. 

• Treats regulatory and security requirements as engineering constraints to design around, not obstacles to route past.

• Prior regulated or high-assurance experience helps but is not a prerequisite. 

• Gets adoption by building things engineers want to use and by making a clear case, not by escalation. 

• Prefers the boring, well-understood solution unless the problem genuinely demands otherwise. Willing to remove things.

  Desirable Experience 

• Architecture or engineering experience with Google Cloud Platform. 

• Experience working 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.

Working at Allica Bank

At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers.

Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind:

• Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities

• Options for flexible working

• Regular social activities

• Pension contributions

• Discretionary bonus scheme

• Private health cover

• Life assurance

• Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity & Paternity leave

Don’t tick every box?

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the skills or requirements listed on the job description. If you think you’ll be a good fit, we’d still love to hear from you!

Flexible working

We know the ‘9-to-5’ isn’t right for everyone. That’s why Allica Bank is fully committed to flexible and hybrid working. Please let us know what is best for you and, if we can, we will do our best to accommodate.

Diversity

We’re a diverse bunch here at Allica, with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds and lifestyles. Our openness and differences make us stronger, and we want everybody to feel comfortable bringing as much of themselves to work with them as they like.