Location: London (Office)

On-Site | Full-time

Compensation: $250K - $300K

We are hiring on behalf of our client who is a high-growth development firm behind a market-leading digital asset launchpad. Operating at a massive scale with over $750M in daily trading volume and nearly $1B in revenue generated over the last two years, the organization maintains a lean, high-impact team of fewer than 100 people.

The environment is fast-paced, data-driven, and maintains a high bar for engineering excellence. Decisions are made through experimentation, bureaucracy is kept to a minimum, and engineers are granted end-to-end ownership of their platforms.

Our client is seeking a Senior Payments Platforms Engineer to own and scale the infrastructure backbone powering critical fiat-to-crypto payment flows. This is a senior technical contributor role designed for an expert who builds cloud-native platforms and defines engineering standards to enable high-velocity product teams.

The successful candidate will bring deep experience from a neobank, payment service provider (PSP), or tier-1 financial institution. This individual will be responsible for ensuring that cloud infrastructure remains reliable, scalable, and compliant under real-world financial constraints and rigorous regulatory expectations.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Architecture: Design and operate multi-region, highly available AWS-based payments infrastructure with financial-grade resilience (active-active/active-passive failover and RTO/RPO commitments).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Manage the full lifecycle of AWS resources (VPC, EKS/ECS, RDS/Aurora, SQS/SNS, API Gateway) using Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK.
• Network Security: Design and enforce network architecture for regulated environments, including private subnets, PrivateLink integrations for third-party providers (e.g., Plaid, Stripe), and WAF/Shield Advanced configurations.
• CI/CD & Deployment: Build and maintain pipelines supporting high-frequency production deployments, including blue/green releases, automated rollbacks, and SLO-gated deployment controls.
• Security & Compliance: Define secrets management strategies (KMS, HSM integration) and design infrastructure controls to satisfy PCI DSS, SOC 2, and regulatory (FCA) audit requirements.
• Observability: Own the monitoring stack (OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, OpenSearch) to surface payment failures, latency spikes, and compliance anomalies.
• Data Platform Management: Manage RDS Aurora PostgreSQL and event streaming (MSK/Kafka) for high-stakes transactional and reconciliation workloads.
• Reliability & Disaster Recovery: Build automated runbooks, chaos engineering experiments, and load-test harnesses. Maintain and test multi-region disaster recovery scenarios.
• Mentorship & Cost Engineering: Drive platform cost efficiency and mentor backend engineers on containerization and 12-factor app best practices.

Requirements

• Deep AWS Expertise: Extensive production experience across core compute, networking, storage, and security services.
• Financial Services Background: Proven track record at a neobank (e.g., Monzo, Revolut), PSP (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com), or a major bank’s infrastructure division.
• IaC & Containers: Mastery of Terraform at scale and strong experience with Kubernetes (EKS) or ECS operations.
• Database & Messaging: Experience running RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL for transactional workloads and operating Kafka (MSK) or Kinesis for financial event pipelines.
• Compliance Literacy: Familiarity with the infrastructure obligations of PCI DSS, SOC 2, or FCA/PRA regulated environments.
• Operational Maturity: Experience in 24/7 on-call rotations for financial systems with a focus on incident response and post-mortems.
• Preferred Qualifications: Experience with Solana or EVM blockchain infrastructure, policy-as-code (OPA), or FinOps certifications. Proficiency in Rust, Python, or Go for tooling is a significant plus.

Benefits

• Compensation: $250K - $300K
• High Impact: Direct ownership of systems reaching hundreds of thousands of users with immediate production impact.
• Location: This is an in-person role based in London.
• Environment: A high-intensity, low-bureaucracy culture where performance is rewarded with significant autonomy.

Interview Process

1. Recruiter / HR Screening Call
2. Founder / CEO Interview
3. Technical Interview I
4. Technical Interview II

Due to the high volume of applications we anticipate, we regret that we are unable to provide individual feedback to all candidates. If you do not hear back from us within 4 weeks of your application, please assume that you have not been successful on this occasion. We genuinely appreciate your interest and wish you the best in your job search.

Commitment to Equality and Accessibility

At MLabs, we are committed to offer equal opportunities to all candidates. We ensure no discrimination, accessible job adverts, and providing information in accessible formats. Our goal is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for all. If you need any reasonable adjustments during any part of the hiring process or you would like to see the job-advert in an accessible format please let us know at the earliest opportunity by emailing human-resources@mlabs.city.

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