DevOps Engineer

Senior Platform / DevOps Engineer - Payments Startup - London

Our client is redefining rewards and hospitality, building a product that moves fast, iterates faster, and scales efficiently. They're an early-stage fintech startup on a mission to become a unicorn, with engineering at the heart of everything they do.

The Role

As the first dedicated DevOps/Platform Engineer, you will design and operate the cloud infrastructure that powers the product. Your key metrics will be developer cycle time and system resilience. You will automate everything while keeping latency low and uptime rock-solid. When infrastructure work slows, you'll jump into product tasks alongside the back-end team, shipping real customer features.

What You'll Do

• Developer Experience & Velocity: Slash build-test-deploy time with fast CI/CD pipelines, pre-baked dev containers, and on-demand preview environments.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Own Terraform modules that manage AWS accounts, VPCs, ECR, ECS/Fargate, EKS/Kubernetes, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, and more.
• Container Orchestration: Standardise images, registries, and rollouts via ECR + ECS/Fargate and Kubernetes (Helm).
• Local Cloud Parity: Use LocalStack (and similar tools) so engineers can spin up near-prod services locally in seconds.
• Observability & Resilience: Instrument services with metrics, tracing, and logging; champion autoscaling, chaos drills, and multi-AZ resilience.
• Security & Compliance: Automate IAM, secret rotation, and CIS-compliant baselines to meet PCI/PSD2 requirements.
• Cross-Functional Collab: Pair with back-end engineers on feature work when infra demands are low—shipping API endpoints, data pipelines, or tooling.
• Continuous Improvement: Measure developer cycle time, uptime, and MTTR; iterate until bottlenecks disappear.

What We're Looking For

Core Skills:

• Expertise in AWS, especially ECS, Fargate, ECR, RDS, DynamoDB, IAM, VPC, ALB/NLB.
• Infrastructure-as-Code mastery with Terraform (bonus for Terragrunt, CDK).
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, Helm charts, and blue/green or canary deploys.
• CI/CD automation using GitHub Actions (or similar), end-to-end pipelines, automated tests, and rollout safety nets.
• Observability skills including metrics, distributed tracing, log aggregation, alert tuning, and on-call ownership.
• Comfortable scripting in Bash and at least one higher-level language (Python, TypeScript, Go, etc.).
• Security-first mindset with experience locking down cloud infrastructure and handling secrets at scale.

Bonus Points:

• Fintech or payments-compliance exposure (PCI DSS, PSD2, ISO 27001).
• Experience with LocalStack or similar local-cloud-emulation tooling.
• Performance tuning for high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Contributions to OSS DevOps tooling or technical blogging.
• Desire to spend ~20-30% of time on product code when infra work is light.

We welcome both senior and strong mid-level candidates who are obsessed with developer happiness, love automating manual work, and enjoy dabbling in product code.