Platform Engineering Lead

About Y TREE

We are a rapidly growing WealthTech business that is re-defining how individuals and families connect and engage with their money. We provide our clients with control over their personal finances, enhancing their ability to achieve their financial and life aspirations.

We are harnessing sophisticated portfolio analytics, innovative behavioural psychology and cutting-edge UX/UI to create a revolutionary experience and transformational outcomes for our users. The business was founded in 2017 by three successful entrepreneurs and business-builders with diverse experiences and skill-sets in Technology, Corporate Advice and Investment Management, and is backed by some of Europe's leading investors.

Team Overview and the Role

The Platform Engineering team is a vital part of our Tech function, based in the UK. It builds and evolves the infrastructure platform the rest of Technology deploys onto: scalable AWS platforms, and high-availability Kubernetes clusters running on EKS and on-premises on Proxmox and Talos Linux.

This is a people leadership role in a technical domain. You will initially lead a team of three- engineers — running their week, developing them, owning their delivery and their capacity — and you will be technically credible enough to hold architectural direction, review work and unblock your team. You are not expected to be the team's primary builder.

You will join a department operating to a defined Team Lead Charter, with frameworks covering weekly intent, standups, incident response, work prioritisation and communication standards. You will be expected to operate within that framework rather than to build your own, and to contribute to improving it.

Main Responsibilities

Leading the team

• Run the team's operating rhythm — weekly intent on Monday, review against it on Friday, and a daily standup run off the board.
• Hold one-to-ones with every report at least fortnightly, author their performance ratings against our competency framework, and be able to name each person's next-level development gap.
• Own the team's capacity: protect critical business-as-usual work, and state the trade-off before re-allocating rather than after.
• Act as Incident Lead for the team's services, holding communication cadence and escalating to process.
• Build resilience into the team — a named deputy, current runbooks, and no single points of failure.
• Run screening and technical assessment for hires into the team.
• Support the growth of team members against a documented set of skills and levels.

Platform

• Architect and deliver scalable AWS platforms, and operate high-availability Kubernetes clusters on EKS and on-premises.
• Own the continuous delivery tooling (Argo CD) and drive meaningful improvement to platform capability against prioritised requirements.
• Build and document large-scale platforms as code using Terraform/OpenTofu, following agreed architectures, standards and patterns.
• Hold accountability for AWS operations, and coach the Platform Administration team through the staged transfer of those operations.
• Communicate risk and security issues to team members and senior stakeholders through structured security and risk analysis.
• Define and manage scoping, requirements definition and prioritisation for Platform Engineering changes, ensuring other technical areas are involved and aware.
• Contribute to and improve availability management, and perform defined availability management tasks.
• Support the creation of reports, Platform roadmapping and the evaluation of emerging technologies and their potential impact.

Remain hands-on enough to review, unblock and hold technical direction — not to be the team's primary builder.

Experience Required

Essential

• Has operated production AWS and Kubernetes environments at scale.
• Has worked in a fast-paced start-up, scale-up or similarly dynamic environment.
• Has led projects spanning multiple technical disciplines.

Desirable

• Experience in a regulated financial services environment. 
• Has led a team of engineers as their line manager — holding one-to-ones, setting development goals, writing performance reviews and handling difficult conversations.
• Experience transferring operational ownership of a platform to another team, including building that team's capability.

Technical Skills

Essential

• Kubernetes
• AWS
• Terraform / OpenTofu (Infrastructure as Code)
• Argo CD (CI/CD)
• Observability tooling — Grafana, metrics, logs and traces
• Technical project management

Desirable

• Proxmox and Talos Linux (bare metal)
• Istio / Cilium (networking and security)
• Vault (secrets management)
• VictoriaMetrics

Personal Characteristics

• Comfortable leading a small team of three engineers
• Strong communication skills, and the ability to simplify and present complex ideas to a range of stakeholders.
• Organised and meticulous, with a structured approach to work.
• Confident to voice an opinion — we run an ideas meritocracy and need people to challenge thinking.
• A critical thinker, able to self-reflect and evaluate.
• Comfortable working within an established operating framework and improving it, rather than replacing it.
• An independent thinker, confident working collaboratively in a small team that is building a business.
• Non-hierarchical and ego-free.
• Passionate about technology.

Location

London — hybrid, two days a week in the office.

Salary: 95000.0 - 110000.0 GBP