Platform Lead Engineer

Job Title: Platform Lead Engineer
Location: Cambridge - 2/3 days on site
Rate: £600 - £675 per day 
Contract Duration: 3 Months (roughly) 
Opporunity to go perm

This start-up are looking for a contract Platform Lead Engineer to help design, build, and scale AWS-based cloud infrastructure to meet the demands of high-performance, production-grade workloads in the financial sector. This is a hands-on role, guiding the Platform team through strategic architecture decisions and operational execution.
You’ll drive the architecture of the cloud-native platform, oversee its security and observability, and ensure seamless integration for internal teams. Your mission is to deliver a robust, secure, and scalable platform core to post-trade innovation in a regulated industry.
What You’ll Do Architecture & Engineering
Help lead the design and delivery of AWS cloud infrastructure for mission-critical production systems.
Develop and evolve the platform’s architecture with a focus on scalability, security, reliability, and operational maturity.
Build and maintain automation for infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and IAM.
Define platform APIs and integration patterns to streamline adoption by internal development teams.
Ensure compliance with frameworks and standards including ISO27001, SOC2, and DORA.Technical Leadership & Strategy
Mentor a multidisciplinary team of cloud engineers and architects.
Take ownership of the platform roadmap, aligning infrastructure goals with product and business strategies.
Provide expert guidance through architecture reviews, mentoring, and code quality practices.
Drive engineering best practices around deployment, testing, observability, and security.Collaboration & Delivery
Partner with engineering leaders and product managers to deliver core infrastructure capabilities.
Collaborate closely with security, compliance, and operations teams to ensure audit readiness and policy alignment.
Work with development teams to ensure platform services are reliable, well-documented, and easy to integrate at scale.What You’ll Bring
Proven leadership in platform engineering within fintech, SaaS, or regulated environments.
Deep experience delivering production-grade Kubernetes-based platforms on AWS.
Strong grasp of cloud-native architecture, including high availability, security, and cost-efficiency.
Familiarity with event-driven system design and microservice patterns.
Proficient with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD tooling.
Hands-on experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes).
Knowledge of service mesh architectures, API gateways, and secure service-to-service communication.
Strong experience with observability tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog.
Expertise in IAM and authentication protocols such as OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML.
Solid coding/scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, TypeScript).
Excellent leadership, communication, and mentoring abilities.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced, mission-driven, and collaborative environment