Head of Platform Engineering

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.

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Allica Bank's rapidly business, designing and managing the modern infrastructure, tools, and automation processes that fuel innovation and accelerate growth. Our Platform Engineers leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) techniques to build secure, scalable, and resilient cloud-native solutions, empowering our technology teams to deliver exceptional experiences to customers. This dynamic, forward-thinking team sits at the heart of Allica Bank, driving reliability and agility across our entire technology landscape, positioning us at the forefront of fintech innovation in the UK.

What you’ll do

As Head of Platform Engineering, you will be responsible for architecting, building, and scaling the core technical platform that powers our products. In close partnership with product, security, and engineering teams, you’ll define and execute our platform roadmap to ensure it meets the evolving needs of the organisation operating in a highly regulated environment. You will shape the direction of our cloud infrastructure, drive developer productivity, and ensure best-in-class reliability and security standards - helping us maintain our edge in a competitive market.

Responsibilities

Platform Strategy & Roadmap

• Develop and champion vision for the platform’s architecture, ensuring scalability, high availability and rapid feature development.

• Align platform goals with broader business objectives, collaborate with product engineering squads to integrate strategic features into our core services.

Technical Leadership

• Lead the architecture design, implementation of workloads, and maintenance of the cloud platform (Azure/GCP), ensuring the infrastructure securely and efficiently deploys our banking applications.

• Establish robust monitoring, alerting and incident management processes to uphold SLAs and SLOs, proactively identifying and resolving potential issues.

Team Management & Development

• Lead, mentor and grow a high-performing Platform Engineering team, attracting and retaining the top-tier talent and nurturing skill development.

• Implement the practises that support knowledge sharing, and continuous learning, fostering a culture of engineering excellence.

Compliance & Security

• Ensure the platform adheres to relevant regulatory/security standards, integrating industry best practises.

• Partner with the security teams to proactively identify, mitigate and resolve vulnerabilities or threats.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate with product, and other technology functions to define platform requirements and deliver mission-critical functionality.

• Communicate platform updates to executive leadership and other stakeholders.

Cost & Vendor Management

• Optimise cloud resource usage and negotiate vendor relationships to maintain a cost-effective yet robust infrastructure.

Personal Attributes & Experience

• Proven track record of designing and building secure and reliable systems in cloud environments (GCP, or Azure).

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Azure Devops, etc.

• Experience managing a team of platform engineers in a fast-paced agile environment.

• Proven ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

• Comfortable presenting to executive leadership and stakeholders, translating technical strategies into business value.

• Adept at balancing short-term priorities with long-term platform vision, ensuring the business can innovate quickly while maintaining operational excellence.

• Demonstrated success in setting measurable OKRs and delivering results in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

• Experience in regulated industries or financial services, with a deep understanding of UK/EU regulatory and compliance frameworks (FCA, PSD2, GDPR).

Working at Allica Bank

At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers.

Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind:

• Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities

• Options for flexible working

• Regular social activities

• Pension contributions

• Discretionary bonus scheme

• Private health cover

• Life assurance

• Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity & Paternity leave

Don’t tick every box?

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the skills or requirements listed on the job description. If you think you’ll be a good fit, we’d still love to hear from you!

Flexible working

We know the ‘9-to-5’ isn’t right for everyone. That’s why Allica Bank is fully committed to flexible and hybrid working. Please let us know what is best for you and, if we can, we will do our best to accommodate.

Diversity

We’re a diverse bunch here at Allica, with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds and lifestyles. Our openness and differences make us stronger, and we want everybody to feel comfortable bringing as much of themselves to work with them as they like.