Lead Platform Engineer

Job Overview

🏷️ Title: Lead Platform Engineer
👫 Department: Engineering, reporting to the CPTO
💰 Salary: £90,000 - £115,000 (depending on experience and seniority)
🎁 Benefits & Culture: Lottie’s careers page here. Lottie’s tech careers page here
📈 Equity: A very generous EMI share offering.
🌴 Holiday: 26 days + bank holidays.
💗 Mission: Elevate later life for everybody and build the care sector of the future.
💻 Office Policy: Hybrid with two core office days or remote.
🌍 Office Location: London Bridge, London, UK or remote, Europe.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure and security foundation that Lottie's engineering teams build on.

This is a broad, high-ownership role. You'll be the person who keeps our cloud infrastructure running well, starts to own our security posture, and looks for ways to improve how our engineers experience the platform underneath them every day. It's not a narrow specialism - we want someone who is energised by the full scope, not just one slice of it.

Lottie's infrastructure is modern, simple and intentional. Our services run on Kubernetes (EKS), deployed following GitOps practices with GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, and monitored with OpenTelemetry-powered logs, traces and metrics. Our cloud surface is split across AWS for compute and GCP for data (BigQuery), with infrastructure managed as code through Terraform. We prioritise pragmatism, stability and solving real problems over technology for technology's sake, and this key role owns the future direction of the platform, observability, security and infrastructure as a whole.

You'll join as the sole owner of this function, which means real autonomy and real accountability. The work is consequential: Lottie is scaling fast, our products carry serious responsibility for the families and care providers who rely on them, and the platform needs to be in safe hands.

What you'll be doing

• Own Lottie's cloud infrastructure end-to-end - reliability, performance, cost, observability and developer experience
• Champion an observability culture where engineers own what they ship - giving teams the dashboards, alerting and tooling to genuinely run their own services, not just deploy them
• Set the guardrails for how we use AI safely - establishing security best practices and ways of working that let teams move fast with AI tooling without creating risk
• Lead our information security accreditations, including ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials - treating them as a chance to genuinely strengthen our posture, not a box-ticking exercise
• Take genuine ownership of our security posture: auditing where we are, identifying gaps, and making pragmatic improvements over time
• Work closely with engineering teams to understand what they need from the platform and build things that actually help them move faster
• Evaluate and improve our IT and vendor setup, including potential managed service arrangements
• We want someone who ties every infrastructure decision back to what it unlocks for the business - not building for the sake of technical interest

We think you'll be a great fit if…

• You're breadth-first: you'd rather own a wide area well than be the deepest possible expert in one narrow slice
• You have solid experience in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering - hands-on with GCP, AWS, or both
• You know Kubernetes deeply - not just deploying to it, but running it in production: scaling, debugging, upgrades, and the operational realities that only come from owning clusters yourself
• You have real observability expertise - you've built monitoring, alerting and tracing that engineers actually use, and you know the difference between collecting metrics and creating insight
• You're comfortable owning security even if it's not your deepest expertise today - you're curious about it, you know what good looks like, and you're willing to learn
• You come from a startup or cloud-native environment and you understand the difference between building for scale and over-engineering
• You have good judgment about what problems are worth solving - you're not chasing technical perfection for its own sake
• You can work well with engineers across teams; you build platform that helps people, not just infrastructure that's technically correct

This role isn't for you if…

• Our mission to elevate later life care doesn’t resonate with you.
• You want to go deep in one specialism and leave the rest to someone else
• Security feels like a different team's problem
• You're most comfortable in a large, structured engineering org rather than a fast-moving startup
• You'd rather build technically impressive things than pragmatically useful ones

Lottie's Interview Process

Talent Screen with Alice Rooke, Talent Lead (20 minutes, remote)
Interview with Julien Lavigne du Cadet, CPTO (45 minutes, remote)
Two one hour technical interviews with members of Lottie engineering team (2 hours, remote)
Behavioural Interview with one of Lottie’s Engineering Leaders (45 minutes, remote)
Final interview with Will Donnelly, Co-Founder & CEO (30 minutes, in person)

Candidate Experience

The majority of feedback will be given via email and we try our very best to give specific and constructive feedback where possible.

Application Review: You will be informed of the outcome but will not receive specific feedback.
Talent Screen: You will be informed of the outcome but will not receive specific feedback.
Interview with Julien: If you are unsuccessful, you will receive constructive feedback via email.
Technical & Behavioural Interviews: If you are unsuccessful, you will receive constructive feedback via email and will be offered a debrief call