Head of Platform Engineering

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Allica Bank

Allica is expanding internationally, establishing a regulated entity in its first international market and deploying the proprietary technology platform there. The platform model is deliberately repeatable, so that further markets can be added if and when the opportunity arises. The purpose of this role is to design and implement a repeatable international platform model, prove it in the first market, and enable each local entity to operate its own identity and local access services within centrally governed technology, security and identity standards.

🎯 The Role

The role owns the international Azure platform end to end, from design and build through ongoing run. Identity is delivered on a build-and-hand-over basis: the role designs and implements each entity's Entra environment, then transitions day-to-day operation to the local team, remaining involved for enhancement rather than implementation. Both sit within a governance model where technical controls are defined centrally by Allica's UK platform and security functions, and each international entity operates as a consumer of those controls with local attestation.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design and build a parameterised Azure landing zone that can be instantiated per market, covering subscription and management group topology, networking, connectivity, policy assignment, and baseline observability.
• Deliver the entire estate through Infrastructure as Code with peer review, automated policy compliance checks, and no manual configuration changes.
• Work with central Technology, Identity and Security teams to design and implement a repeatable Entra operating model for international entities, including tenant structure, directory topology, privileged-access patterns, joiner–mover– leaver processes and conditional-access baselines.
• Ensure each local entity has the capability, documentation, access model, runbooks and evidence processes required to operate its own Entra tenant day-to-day.
• Produce and maintain a local-delta attestation template that scales to further markets.
• Ensure the platform meets DORA and operational resilience obligations — ICT risk management, incident classification and reporting, resilience testing, and third-party ICT arrangements.
• Own service availability and performance for the international platform, including on-call arrangements, incident management, SLOs, capacity, and change management.
• Define an operating model that is sustainable for a small team across time zones, and that scales as markets are added rather than multiplying headcount linearly.
• Recruit, lead, and develop a small, senior engineering team. Set the technical bar and be an active participant in the work.

🎯 Required Qualifications

• Substantial hands-on Azure architecture experience at scale, including landing zone design, management group and subscription topology, networking, and Azure Policy.
• Deep, practical Infrastructure as Code capability (Terraform) including module design for reuse, and CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure.
• Demonstrable experience designing and operating Microsoft Entra ID in a multi-entity or multi-tenant context: tenancy models, conditional access, privileged identity management, and identity lifecycle automation.
• Delivery within a regulated financial services environment, with working knowledge of operational resilience expectations and DORA, and direct experience producing evidence for regulators or auditors.
• Experience running production platforms, not only building them, incident management, on-call, and service ownership.
• Track record leading small, senior engineering teams while remaining technically hands-on.
• Comfort operating within a centrally governed control environment, and the judgement to distinguish a genuine local regulatory requirement from a preference.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Work closely with UK platform, security, and product-engineering functions. This role influences the central control set through evidence and horizon scanning, and does not d

🎁 Benefits

Competitive

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Not specified