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.