Platform Engineer

Lead Backend Platform Engineer

London

Full time permanent

Competitive salary plus equity

A fast growing product team is looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to take technical ownership of the backend and platform foundations. This is a hands on leadership role for someone who still wants to build the hardest parts of the system while setting the engineering bar for a small team.

Location and working pattern

This role is London based and requires four days per week onsite. There is no flexibility on the onsite requirement.

What you will do

• Build and own core backend services and APIs from design through to production
• Lead architecture decisions for scalable microservices and event driven systems
• Own reliability and performance as the platform scales
• Coach and unblock engineers through reviews pairing and delivery leadership
• Shape how the team uses modern AI assisted development workflows in day to day engineering
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to decide what to build next and what not to build yet

What we are looking for

• 5 plus years building backend systems in production environments
• Proven experience leading projects or leading engineers as a senior or lead
• Strong Node.js experience and deep NestJS knowledge
• Strong API design skills and experience with microservices patterns
• Comfort owning cloud infrastructure decisions and deployment patterns
• Product mindset and ability to translate messy real world workflows into solid systems
• Experience building with LLMs or agent style pipelines is a big plus
• Startup pace mindset you like ownership and moving quickly with high standards
• Ideally a strong academic background, with a degree from a Russell Group university preferred

Tech overview

• Backend built with NestJS
• Frontend includes Next.js
• Microservices and event driven approach
• Cloud native environment with containers and Kubernetes
• Datastores include Postgres plus additional data stores depending on use case

What you get

• Real technical ownership from day one
• Direct access to senior engineering leadership
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• If you are a backend leaning lead who wants to build and lead at the same time, message me for the full details and a quick intro call.