Platform Engineer

Job Description This is a remote position. CreatePay is building its Payment Facilitator (PayFac)/Acquiring platform on AWS and is building a dedicated platform engineering capability from the ground up. We are looking for a hands-on Platform Engineer to build and own the infrastructure the platform runs on, day to day. This is the first dedicated platform hire at CreatePay — the role is deliberately pitched for someone looking to build their own path into platform/infrastructure engineering, rather than an established platform lead looking to manage an existing team or programme. You will take practical, day-to-day ownership of CreatePay's cloud infrastructure: provisioning and hardening AWS environments, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, keeping the serverless and data estate — API Gateway, Lambda, Aurora PostgreSQL — reliable, observable, and cost-efficient, and acting as first responder when something breaks. You will work closely with Engineering, Data Engineering, the Information Security Officer, and outsourced delivery partners to make sure the platform is resilient by design, not patched together after the fact. This is a genuine opportunity to define a discipline — to own the infrastructure behind a real, regulated, in-production payments environment, set the practices and standards it runs on, and grow the role, and yourself, as CreatePay scales. Requirements We are looking for a self-starter with roughly 2–5 years' hands-on platform, infrastructure, or DevOps experience (junior to mid-level) who wants to specialise and grow into an in-house platform engineering career, rather than someone already operating at head-of-platform level. You should be comfortable with core AWS infrastructure tooling — infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK), CI/CD pipelines, API Gateway, Lambda, and Aurora PostgreSQL — and confident applying fundamentals such as high availability, fault tolerance, observability, and cost control in a live environment. Payments or fintech exposure is an advantage but not required; what matters more is a practical, first-principles approach to infrastructure, and the ability to explain what you're doing and why in plain terms to engineers and the wider business alike. We value people who implement pragmatic, well-understood patterns over those who lean on theory, jargon, or unnecessary complexity. A platform you've built and kept running, or an incident you've resolved and can clearly explain, will count for far more than a stack of certifications. Core Responsibilities Infrastructure & Environment Management • Provision, configure, and harden AWS environments — networking, compute, and storage — using infrastructure as code • Maintain clear separation and consistent configuration across development, staging, and production environments • Own capacity planning and cost management across the AWS estate CI/CD & Delivery Pipelines • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that let Engineering (Internal and Partners) ship safely and frequently • Implement automated testing, deployment, and rollback processes • Support deployment of AI generated applications and tooling • Support change control and release management alongside Engineering and the Information Security Officer Reliability, Observability & Data Infrastructure • Design and maintain systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience by default • Implement logging, monitoring, and alerting (for example CloudWatch) across services and infrastructure • Maintain data pipelines, backup, and lifecycle management for Aurora PostgreSQL and other AWS-native data tooling Platform Operations & Incident Response • Act as first responder for infrastructure incidents, supporting root cause analysis and post-incident review • Coordinate patching, upgrades, and lifecycle management across the AWS estate • Support ICT disaster recovery testing and business continuity exercises Technology Environment • AWS (primary platform) — VPC, IAM, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, Aurora PostgreSQL • Infrastructure as code — Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK • CI/CD tooling — for example GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild • Observability — CloudWatch, centralised logging and alerting • Event-driven and serverless architecture patterns; Node.js application runtime Key Requirements The following experience is essential. Candidates who demonstrate strong practical ability across these areas will be prioritised regardless of formal qualifications. • Foundational platform experience: 2–5 years hands-on in a platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure role, with cloud experience (AWS preferred) • Infrastructure as code: practical experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK • CI/CD pipelines: built and maintained automated build, test, and deployment pipelines • Reliability & observability: comfortable designing for high availability and implementing monitoring and alerting • Practical, explainable engineering: favours pragmatic, well-understood patterns over unnecessary complexity, and can explain reasoning clearly to technical and non-technical audiences • Self-starter mindset: comfortable defining scope and priorities with minimal oversight, motivated by the chance to build a domain rather than inherit one The following experience is advantageous but not essential: • Exposure to payments, fintech, or high-availability transactional systems • Experience with serverless architectures and event-driven design (Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/SNS/EventBridge) • Relational database experience, ideally PostgreSQL / Aurora • An AWS certification (for example AWS Certified Solutions Architect or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer) • Experience working with or alongside outsourced engineering teams Operating Model • Reports to the CTO, with a close working relationship with Engineering and the Information Security Officer • First dedicated platform hire — genuine scope to define the role and build the function as CreatePay scales • Independent mindset; pragmatic; collaborative with Engineering and Data Engineering • Bias toward practical, implemented reliability over process for its own sake Output Expectations • Infrastructure that is secure, scalable, observable, and cost-efficient • CI/CD pipelines that let Engineering ship safely and quickly • Clear, current infrastructure documentation and runbooks that the team actually follows • A track record the postholder can point to: incidents resolved, reliability improved, cost and efficiency gains delivered Benefits • £50,000 – £70,000 base salary, depending on experience • Equity / options — a stake in the business • Significant scope to grow the role and take on broader platform/infrastructure leadership as CreatePay scales • Hybrid working (likely 1 day a week in the office in Milton Keynes) Please note, this position is only suitable for candidates who currently live in and are eligible to work in the UK. CreatePay is an equal opportunities employer, and we welcome applications from candidates with non-traditional career paths where the experience is demonstrably there.