Director of Platform

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:

• Income Protection.
• Permanent employees enjoy access to our Share Options Scheme.
• 5% back on in app purchases.
• £200 for WFH Setup.
• 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.
• Physiotherapy.
• Advanced cancer cover.
• 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.

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.
• Hybrid Working.
• Casual dress code.
• Workplace socials.

To apply for this role, please submit your CV along with a cover letter.

We acknowledge receipt of your resume for a position at Zilch and we appreciate your interest in joining our business.

We will screen all applicants and select candidates whose qualifications meet our requirements. We will carefully consider your application during the initial screening and will contact you if you are selected to continue to the next stage of the recruitment process. We wish you every success.

Zilch Technology is an equal opportunities employer and we encourage all applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief.

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