Senior Platform Engineer - Developer Experience iwoca

Senior Platform Engineer - Developer Experience

Hybrid in London or Remote within the United Kingdom

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to join the Platform team.

You’ll enable everyone at iwoca to build and ship with confidence, from engineers to analysts. You'll make it simpler and safer for people to deploy apps on their own, and keep improving the experience as iwoca grows.

The company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.

We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The team

The Platform team leads iwoca’s developer experience work. It looks after three areas:

• Infrastructure. iwoca’s Kubernetes platform, GitOps deployments, CI components, and developer environments.

• The route to production. The templates, tooling, and safe defaults teams use to go from a repository to production and run their own services.

• The AI platform. Access to the latest models, an internal Claude Code plugin marketplace, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI tools to iwoca’s systems.

The Platform team is part of Core Systems, a group of about a dozen people who provide the shared tools and infrastructure that iwoca’s engineering, data, and analytics teams rely on. You’ll be one of six engineers in the Platform team.

The role

As the Senior Platform Engineer, you’ll own the developer experience roadmap and agree with the team on where you can make the biggest impact for the platform’s users. You’ll decide how each self-service tool works and build it yourself, making clear trade-offs between developer experience, reliability, security, and cost. The tools you build help teams get code live faster which results in fewer support requests for the Platform team.

Today, getting a new service live takes many separate steps and a lot of platform knowledge. You’ll spend most of your time building new self-service tools, and the rest migrating existing tooling and talking to users about where they get stuck. If you haven’t worked deeply with Kubernetes, Terraform, or GitOps, you can learn them here, with the team and plenty of resources to help. You’ll likely start with the friction map below.

Live project examples:

• Friction map. Measuring how long it takes someone outside Core Systems to get new code live, and how many steps they go through. The result could be written documentation or a dashboard.

• New services. Turning the merge requests a new service needs into one guided flow, so fewer changes wait for review.

• AI guardrails. Building the Claude skills and checks that help AI-written changes pass review and deploy cleanly first time.

The requirements

Essential:

• Software engineering. You’ve written and maintained production code in Python or Go, including tools and automation.

• Ownership. You’ve set the direction for a platform or tooling area and looked after it for the long term. You’ve decided what to fix first and seen the work through.

• Building for internal users. You’ve built tooling and written documentation for other engineers, or for colleagues who aren’t engineers, and changed both based on how people used them.

• AI leverage. You’ve used AI to produce work you couldn’t have delivered without it. You know where it speeds up changes, and where a change needs careful human review.

Bonus:

• Kubernetes. You’ve deployed and debugged services on Kubernetes, and know its common resources and terms.

• CI/CD and GitOps. You’ve built or maintained CI pipelines in GitLab CI or a similar system, and deployed services through a GitOps tool such as Flux or Argo CD.

• Infrastructure as code. You’ve defined cloud resources in Terraform or a similar tool.

• Delivery metrics. You’ve tracked measures such as lead time or deployment frequency, and used them to judge whether a change helped.

• Developer environments. You’ve worked with cloud workspaces or devcontainers, and know what makes a developer environment pleasant to work in.

The salary

We expect to pay from £90,000 to £120,000 for this role. But, we're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.

We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.

• Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.

The benefits

• Flexible working hours.

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.

• Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links:

• iwoca benefits & policies

• Interview welcome pack