Principal Platform Engineer

About us and the Team Tokenovate provides software solutions for capital markets. Using hybrid cloud and blockchain technology, Tokenovate delivers an asset class-agnostic lifecycle platform enabling tokenisation of assets, digital custody, issuance and distribution, collateral mobility for margin and settlement, and automation of post-trade workflows. Our vision is to simplify trade through a secure, compliant and scalable platform that reduces cost and friction, increases operational efficiency and transparency, and mitigates overall risk. We aim to become a global market leader in financial market infrastructure technology. We are a UK-based start-up at an early but well-funded stage of development. We are transitioning from product build into commercial launch and customer operation. Our team blends in-house technical leadership with trusted nearshore engineering capability, united by shared energy, empathy and purpose. We work closely, move quickly, and value hands-on problem-solving, ownership and collaboration over hierarchy. Our offices are in Cambridge Science Park and the City of London. NO AGENCIES. The Role: We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to provide deep technical leadership across Tokenovate’s cloud platform. This role is responsible for the technical integrity of our AWS, EKS, GitOps and CI/CD platform. You will review and harden the existing baseline, guide remaining platform build work, mentor engineers, set technical standards and ensure the platform can support secure, reliable and repeatable customer environments. This is a hands-on senior engineering role. It is not a people-management role, but it carries significant technical leadership responsibility. You will be expected to lead by judgement, example and engineering quality. The role is suited to someone who has designed, built and operated production-grade cloud-native platforms, preferably in SaaS, fintech or regulated environments. NOTE that this role is Cambridge or London based, with 2-3 days per week in the office. You must have the right to work in the UK. Responsibilities: Platform Architecture and Technical Direction Own technical direction for the AWS, EKS, Argo CD and GitOps-based platform.Review the existing platform baseline and identify risks, gaps and improvement areas.Define and evolve technical standards for cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, security and resilience.Guide design decisions for customer environments, shared platform services and deployment models.Produce and maintain architecture decision records for key platform choices.Prevent brittle one-off solutions by driving reusable, repeatable platform patterns. Cloud, Kubernetes and GitOps Engineering Provide deep technical leadership across AWS, EKS, Terraform, Argo CD and GitOps.Review infrastructure as code, Helm charts, Kubernetes configuration and deployment patterns.Support secure and reliable runtime architecture for production workloads.Guide cluster hardening, network design, IAM, secrets management and environment isolation.Support the evolution of the SaaS factory and repeatable customer environment provisioning. Security, Resilience and Operational Hardening Ensure platform designs support ISO27001, SOC2 and DORA expectations.Review platform controls for security, access management, encryption, network boundaries and auditability.Lead improvements in backup, restore, disaster recovery and resilience.Support production readiness reviews and operational hardening.Help define observability, alerting and runbook standards.Support complex production incidents and post-incident technical analysis. Mentoring and Engineering Standards Mentor platform, infrastructure and automation engineers.Provide technical review and coaching through design reviews, code reviews and pairing.Raise engineering standards across infrastructure, deployment, testing and operational hygiene.Help engineers become more T-shaped across AWS, Kubernetes, GitOps, CI/CD, observability and support.Create documentation and technical guidance that reduces key-person dependency. Collaboration Work closely with the Head of Platform Engineering, CTO, application engineering teams, security and operations stakeholders.Translate technical complexity into clear risks, trade-offs and recommendations.Support product and customer delivery by ensuring platform capabilities are reliable, well-documented and scalable.Partner with SRE and operations capability to feed production insight back into platform improvements. Required Skills and Experience: Deep experience designing, building and operating AWS-based cloud platforms.Strong hands-on Kubernetes/EKS experience in production environments.Strong infrastructure as code experience, preferably Terraform.Experience with GitOps, preferably Argo CD.Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, release automation and deployment safety.Strong knowledge of IAM, networking, secrets management, encryption and cloud-native security.Experience with observability patterns across metrics, logs and traces.Experience with high availability, backup, restore and disaster recovery.Strong engineering judgement and ability to make practical trade-offs.Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical standards.Strong scripting or programming ability in one or more of Python, Go, TypeScript, Bash or similar.Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, commercially focused start-up environment. Nice to Have Experience in fintech, financial services, capital markets, payments or regulated SaaS.Experience with ISO27001, SOC2, DORA or regulated control environments.Experience with multi-deployment, single-tenant or multi-tenant SaaS architectures.Experience with API gateways, service mesh, OAuth2, OIDC or SAML.Experience with VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Datadog or similar.Experience with AWS services such as RDS, S3, MSK, Glue, CloudWatch, KMS, GuardDuty and Security Hub.Experience with JFrog, GitHub Actions and Helm.Interest in digital assets, tokenisation or financial market infrastructure. Technical Environment Cloud: AWSContainer Orchestration: Kubernetes on EKSGitOps: Argo CDCI/CD: GitHub ActionsInfrastructure as Code: TerraformDeployment: Helm, Kubernetes manifests and related toolingObservability: VictoriaMetrics, Grafana and related toolingLanguages: Java, Kotlin, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, BashProduction Systems: Tokenovate SaaS platform, customer environments and internal support services What This Role Is A hands-on senior technical platform engineering role.A role focused on architecture quality, hardening, resilience and engineering standards.A role that mentors engineers and raises the technical bar.A role that helps turn a baseline platform into a scalable commercial platform. What This Role Is Not A people-management role.A pure architecture role detached from implementation.A ticket-taking infrastructure role.A support-only role.A role limited to one narrow technology area.