SENIOR PLATFORM ENGINEER Full Time NEW

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 Senior Platform Engineer who will be a key part of this mission, playing a leading role in the design and evolution of our Internal Developer Platform — driving self-service infrastructure, automation, and tooling that enhances engineering effectiveness, reliability, and security across the organisation.

The role👋

• Lead the design and delivery of self-service infrastructure and developer tooling, setting the technical direction for how platform capabilities are built and evolved
• Define and champion platform abstractions that reduce complexity, accelerate delivery, and establish golden paths for engineering teams
• Own the strategy and continuous improvement of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, enabling teams to operate their services autonomously with confidence
• Drive improvements to the observability stack using tools like CloudWatch, X-Ray, and Grafana, ensuring system transparency across engineering
• Proactively identify inefficiencies and gaps in the platform, shape the solutions, and own their inclusion in the roadmap
• Establish and enforce best practices for resiliency and reliability to ensure platform stability and eliminate single points of failure
• Lead on embedding security best practices into infrastructure, CI/CD processes, and automation frameworks in close partnership with Information and Cyber Security teams
• Develop deep relationships with Product Engineering teams to anticipate their needs and drive meaningful improvements to platform capabilities
• Mentor and support mid-level Platform Engineers, acting as a technical reference point and helping others grow
• Champion a culture of open communication, cross-team collaboration, and experimentation
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where team members can challenge ideas and share feedback openly and respectfully

What You’ll Bring 💼

• Substantial experience in cloud platforms with a track record of leading the design and delivery of platform services for developer enablement
• Deep expertise in IaC and a language-agnostic approach to automation — we don’t believe tools or technology should ever be a barrier
• Extensive hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms and a strong command of core containerisation concepts
• Proven experience leading the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines with a focus on deployment automation, reliability, and developer experience
• Strong knowledge of observability, logging, and monitoring best practices, with experience owning and evolving an observability strategy
• A collaborative and product-minded approach, with the ability to influence platform direction and advocate for engineering teams at a senior level
• Excellent communication skills — able to articulate complex technical ideas clearly to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders
• A low ego working style that fosters open collaboration and creates space for everyone to contribute 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.

About Us

We’re OakNorth Bank and we embolden entrepreneurs to realise their ambitions, understand their markets, and apply data intelligence to everyday decisions to scale successfully at pace.

Banking should be barrier-free. It’s a belief at our very core, inspired by our entrepreneurial spirit, driven by the unmet financial needs of millions, and delivered by our data-driven tools.

And for those who love helping businesses thrive? Our savings accounts help diversify the high street and create new jobs, all while earning savers some of the highest interest on the market.

But we go beyond finance, to empower our people, encourage professional growth and create an environment where everyone can thrive. We strive to create an inclusive and diverse workplace where people can be themselves and succeed.

Our story

OakNorth Bank was built on the foundations of frustrations with old-school banking. In 2005, when our founders tried to get capital for their data analytics company, the computer said ‘no’. Unfortunately, all major banks in the UK were using the same computer – and it was broken.

Why was it so difficult for a profitable business with impressive cashflow, retained clients, and clear commercial success to get a loan?

The industry was backward-looking and too focused on historic financials, rather than future potential.

So, what if there was a bank, founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs? One that offered a dramatically better borrowing experience for businesses?

No more what ifs, OakNorth Bank exists.

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