Lead Platform Engineer

About Allica Bank Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company - and the fastest-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech. Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities - representing over a third of our economy - yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers. Department Description Platform Engineering is the centralised team that builds, provisions and runs the infrastructure every other engineering team at Allica depends on. Whether a product serves a business banking customer or a colleague inside the bank, it lands on a platform this team designed. The team owns both halves of that, building the platform and running it, against the availability and resilience standards a regulated bank is held to. Well-architected is the operating standard, not an aspiration: reliability, security, cost and operational excellence are design inputs from the start. The job is to make the right thing the easy thing, through paved roads, self-service provisioning, sensible defaults, and controls encoded in the platform rather than bolted on afterwards. Every control the platform enforces is one a product team does not have to think about, and one we can evidence on demand. Role Description The Lead Platform Engineer is the senior technical leader for a core domain of Allica's platform. You set its technical direction, you are accountable for how it behaves in production, and you build it yourself. This is a hands-on role. Expect to spend a real share of your week in infrastructure as code, pipelines and live systems, and the rest setting standards, reviewing designs and making the calls that are too consequential to delegate. Your customers are internal. Product engineering and data engineering choose whether to use what you build, so adoption and the friction you remove are the measures that matter. Principal Accountabilities Platform Architecture and Engineering - Own the architecture of Allica’s Cloud platform: landing zones, subscriptions and network topology, container runtime, and the integration and resilience patterns that sit on top. Design again Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework as working disciplines.  - Build the reusable core: Terraform modules, deployment templates and platform services that let a team stand up production-grade infrastructure without reinventing the security, networking and observability plumbing each time. Infrastructure as Code and Automation  - Deliver and manage all infrastructure through Terraform and secure CI/CD, so that every change is automated, repeatable, version-controlled, tested, and reversible. Drive manual change and configuration drift towards zero.  - Set and evolve engineering standards for the function: code quality, peer review, policy as code and, release management. Security, Governance, and Compliance  - Embed security, governance, and compliance throughout the platform lifecycle, implementing effective policies, access controls, encryption, vulnerability management, monitoring, and configuration standards.  - Collaborate with Allica’s Security, Engineering, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure platforms meet organisational, regulatory, and control requirements, supported by clear documentation and auditable evidence.  - Identify and manage architectural risks, security vulnerabilities, control gaps, and technical debt, ensuring remediation actions are prioritised, tracked, and completed. Platform Operations and Service Ownership  - Own availability, reliability, and run cost for the platform, backed by service objectives, monitoring y