PLATFORM ENGINEER Full Time

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $21 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.

Team Mission 🚀

As we continue to scale, we’re looking for self-starters and bold thinkers who are excited to build on this success and help shape the next generation of financial products and platforms delivering real value to both individuals and businesses. We are looking for a Platform Engineer, you will be a key part of this mission, working to provide self-service infra, automation, and tools that enhance engineering effectiveness, reliability, and security.

The role👋

• Design and build self-service infrastructure and developer tooling to enhance engineering effectiveness
• Improve the developer experience by creating platform abstractions that reduce complexity and accelerate delivery
• Enable teams to own and operate their services autonomously by continuously refining CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC)
• Improve system transparency for our teams by enhancing the observability stack using tools like CloudWatch, X-Ray and Grafana
• Take initiative to identify inefficiencies in the platform and plan with Senior Engineers for the solutions to be included in the roadmap
• Implement best practices for resiliency and reliability to ensure platform stability and reduce single points of failure
• Work together with the Information and Cyber Security teams to help embed security best practices into infrastructure, CI/CD processes, and automation frameworks
• Work closely with Product Engineering teams to understand their pain points and proactively improve platform capabilities
• Partner with Senior Platform Engineers with a willingness to take initiative
• Promote open communication, cross-team collaboration, and a culture of experimentation
• Foster a culture of upward feedback that enables bidirectional growth.
• Help ensure a psychologically safe environment where team members can challenge ideas and solutions respectfully and share feedback openly.

What You’ll Bring 💼

• Experience in cloud platforms with a focus on building and maintaining platform services for developer enablement
• Strong IaC concepts and language agnostic automation skills. We at Oaknorth do not believe that different tools, languages or technology should ever be a barrier
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms with a strong understanding of the core containerisation concepts
• Experienced in designing, implementing CI/CD pipelines with an emphasis on deployment automation and reliability thus adding to developer experience
• Knowledge of observability, logging, and monitoring best practices
• A collaborative and product-minded approach, focusing on enabling engineering teams
• Enjoy collaborating with engineers, security and product teams while working in an Agile setup
• Good communication skills that make it easy to understand complex technical ideas
• A low ego working style that supports open collaboration and encourages everyone to share ideas

How We Expect You To Work 👷‍♀️

• We expect you to work in these ways, as well as encouraging and enabling these practices from others:
• Collaborate 💬 – We work in cross-functional, mission driven, autonomous squads that gel over time. We pair program to work better through shared experience and knowledge.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs✅ – Solving a problem for users that translates to business results is our goal. Measurements focused on that goal help us to understand if we are succeeding.
• Practice continuous improvement💡 – We optimise for feedback now, rather than presume what might be needed in the future and introduce complexity before it will be used. This means we learn faster. We share learnings in blame-free formats, so that we do not repeat things that have failed, but still have confidence to innovate.
• Seek to understand our users👂 – We constantly seek understanding from data and conversations to better serve our users’ needs, taking an active part in research to hear from them directly and regularly.
• Embrace and enable continuous deployment🤖 – Seamless delivery of changes into an environment – without manual intervention – is essential for us to ensure that we are highly productive; consider resiliency; and practice security by design.
• Test outside-in, test first 🚦 – TDD keeps us confident in moving fast and deploying regularly. We want to solve user problems, and so we test with that mindset – writing scenarios first, then considering our solution; coupling tests to behaviour, rather than implementation.
• You build it, you run it⚙️ – We embrace DevOps culture and end-to-end ownership of products and features. Every engineer, regardless of their role, can lead delivery of features from start to finish.
• Be cloud native☁️ – We leverage automation and hosted services to deliver resilient, secure services quickly and consistently.

How We Expect You To Behave ❤️

• We embrace difference and know that when we can be ourselves at work, we are happier, more motivated, and creative. We want to be able to bring our whole selves to work, have our own perspectives and know that we belong. As such, through your behaviours at work, we expect you to reflect and actively sustain a healthy engineering environment that looks like this:
• A wide range of voices heard to the benefit of all
• Teams that are clearly happy, engaged, and laugh together
• Perceivable safety to have an opinion or ask a question
• No egos – people listen to and learn from others at all levels, with strong opinions held loosely

What Makes Working Here Better 😍

• This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in-person for whiteboarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
• Work-life balance 🌴 – 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
• Competitive salary & equity 🏦 – We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
• Good kit 💻 – Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS.
• Team socials 🎉 – The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
• Company socials 🥡 – A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts Lunches and dinners on OakNorth – or at our free barista bar every day.
• Commuter support 🚲 – We offer the cycle to work and EV scheme.