Lead and unify Cloud Platform, SRE, Data Platform, and Data Engineering to deliver reliable, scalable multi-region infrastructure. Own platform roadmap, IaC standards, observability, SLOs/error budgets, incident/post-mortem practices, and cross-functional alignment to drive measurable business outcomes while mentoring technical leaders and improving operational excellence.
Who we are:
Zilch is a payment tech company on a mission to create the most empowering way to pay for anything, anywhere. Combining the best of debit, credit and savings, we give our customers the option to earn instant cashback or spread the cost of pricier purchases, completely interest free and with no late fees. Pretty great, right?
We started in 2018 with a small team and a big dream - to make credit accessible to all. Since then, we've achieved double unicorn status and taken on more than 5 million customers. There are some exciting projects coming up and we’ve got big growth plans.
Want to join us?
About the role.
This is a senior Leadership role for a hands-on technical leader, with a focused mandate to lead Cloud Platform, SRE, Data Platform and Data Engineering, sets high technical standards, and challenges teams to raise the bar and continually improve. The role strengthens functional leadership, providing clear accountability for delivery, performance, and team engagement. It ensures closer alignment between technical capabilities and the company’s strategic priorities, enabling technology to effectively inform business decision-making and growth.
Role Responsibilities.
- Lead the Platform function, including Cloud Platform, SRE, Data Platform, and Data Engineering, ensuring operational excellence, secure multi-region foundations, system reliability, and scalable infrastructure, and actively review designs, Terraform/IaC, and operational runbooks to enforce standards.
- Establish clear accountability for delivery, performance, and team engagement across platform and data engineering teams.
- Drive alignment between technical capabilities and company strategy, ensuring technology investments deliver measurable business outcomes.
- Partner with Product, Service Operations and Commercial teams to improve cross-functional collaboration, enabling analytics-driven decisions and rapid product innovation.
- Define and execute the platform roadmap, including cloud architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and data pipelines, deployment standards, and observability, publishing opinionated platform standards and tracking adoption.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement, relentless delivery, operational resilience, and technical excellence by setting clear technical standards, providing hands-on coaching, and constructively challenging designs and assumptions with data.
- Establish user-centric SLOs and a pragmatic error-budget policy with Delivery, and tie error budgets to change gating to protect reliability; lead major-incident and post-mortem practice in partnership with IT servicing.
- Mentor and develop high-performing technical leaders and engineers through hands-on coaching, design reviews, and timely, direct feedback.
- Evaluate emerging technologies to maintain a competitive, scalable, and cost-effective platform.
Requirements & Required Skills.
- Proven experience leading cloud platform/SRE and data platform/engineering teams, including incident leadership and SRE outcomes, in fintech or high-growth technology companies.
- Strong technical expertise in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, data pipelines, and enterprise-grade systems.
- Demonstrated ability to align technology strategy with business goals and deliver measurable value.
- Skilled at cross-functional collaboration, with experience influencing Product, Finance, and Commercial stakeholders.
- Track record of fostering operational excellence, team engagement, and high standards of technical delivery, raising the technical bar regularly with measurable improvements.
- Exceptional leadership and hands-on technical mentoring; comfortable reading code/IaC and diving into production issues.
- Comfortable navigating a fast-paced, evolving environment with multiple competing priorities.
- Infrastructure as Code experience and knowledge. Terraform strongly preferred.
- Cloud Platform experience and knowledge. AWS strongly preferred.
- Data Engineering and platform experience and knowledge. DBT, FiveTran and Snowflake strongly preferred.
- Database management experience and knowledge. SQL Server, Postgres, DynamoDB strongly preferred.
Nice-to-Haves.
- Experience in payments, high-volume transactional systems, or regulated environments.
- Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and incident management best practices.
Benefits.
Compensation & Savings:
- Pension scheme.
- Death in Service scheme.
- Income Protection.
- Permanent employees enjoy access to our Share Options Scheme.
- 5% back on in-app purchases.
- £200 for WFH Setup.
Health & Wellbeing:
- Private Medical Insurance including;
- GP consultations (video, telephone or face-to-face).
- Prescribed medication.
- In-patient, day-patient and out-patient care.
- Mental health support.
- Optical, dental & audiological cover.
- Physiotherapy.
- Advanced cancer cover.
- Menopause support.
- Employee Assistance Programme including:
- Unlimited mental health sessions.
- 24/7 remote GP & physiotherapy.
- 24/7 helpline for emotional & practical support.
- Savings & discounts on everyday shopping.
- 1:1 personalised well-being consultations.
- Gym membership discounts.
Family Friendly Policies:
- Enhanced maternity pay.
- Enhanced paternity pay.
- Enhanced adoption pay.
- Enhanced shared parental leave.
Learning & Development:
- Professional Qualifications.
- Professional Memberships.
- Learning Suite for e-courses.
- Internal Training Programmes.
- FCA & Regulatory training.
Workplace Perks:
- Hybrid Working.
- Casual dress code.
- Workplace socials.
- Healthy snacks.
Top Skills
Terraform,Infrastructure-As-Code (Iac),Aws,Ci/Cd,Data Pipelines,Dbt,Fivetran,Snowflake,Sql Server,Postgres,Dynamodb
Zilch London, England Office
London, United Kingdom
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