Lead Platform Engineer

About

We’re looking for an experienced Lead Platform Engineer to ensure Midnite is reliable, performant, and always available, no matter the time of day. You’ll play a key role in shaping the evolution of our core platform, setting engineering standards, and driving improvements across our infrastructure and backend systems.

You’ll work closely with our Head Of Platform Engineering and the global Platform team, taking ownership of critical systems design, reliability engineering, and deployment practices. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role where you’ll be the person the team relies on when things break, and the person they trust when things need to scale or improve.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. Expect to spend most of your time in the code, working alongside the team to ship production changes. You’ll also manage a small team of engineers, helping set the direction, coaching them day‑to‑day, and creating a high‑performing, engineering‑led culture. Expect meaningful ownership and to be challenged and rewarded in equal measure.

Technical

Our platform is primarily built in Python and hosted on AWS, incorporating Flask, Pytest, Mypy, Docker, Postgre SQL, SQS, S3, and Terraform. We deploy daily.

Responsibilities

As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will:

• Own and drive architectural decisions across the platform, focusing on uptime, resilience, scalability, and performance.
• Lead technical design for complex cross‑team projects, especially those touching core infrastructure or platform reliability.
• Identify and drive improvements in deployment pipelines, observability, performance monitoring, and systems architecture.
• Anticipate failure points, plan for scaling, and ensure the platform remains robust as usage grows.
• Guide the adoption of best practices in platform engineering, reliability, testing, and operational excellence.
• Work closely with partners and vendors to integrate their products into our systems in a safe, repeatable, and scalable way.
• Support senior engineers in unblocking cross‑team issues, acting as the technical escalation point.
• You’ll regularly contribute code, reviews, and production changes as part of the team’s daily delivery.

Collaboration & Leadership

You’ll collaborate with the wider engineering team, product, design, and trading teams to ensure platform decisions support Midnite’s ambitions.

In this role, you will:

• Manage and develop a small team of engineers, creating the environment for them to perform at a high level.
• Mentor engineers across the broader team, helping them improve technical depth, delivery capability, and decision making.
• Facilitate technical discussions and planning sessions, ensuring clarity, alignment, and pragmatic decision‑making.
• Delegate effectively, enabling others to move fast while ensuring engineering standards remain high.
• Drive accountability and ownership across the Platform team, defining how we build, deploy, and maintain our systems.
• Play a key role in hiring by running technical interviews and shaping the make‑up of the Platform function.
• Strengthen the culture across engineering, promoting a focus on reliability, quality, and continuous improvement.

The next Midniter:

• 7+ years of engineering experience with deep expertise in Python or an equivalent modern language (e.g. Go, Rust), and cloud‑based systems.
• Proven experience leading or managing engineers in a platform, backend, or infrastructure‑focused role.
• Strong background in building resilient, scalable, and high‑performance distributed systems.
• Ability to break down ambiguous and complex problems into clear plans and well‑defined milestones.
• Demonstrated impact improving reliability, performance, and the developer experience.
• Hands‑on technical leadership – able to dive into code and architecture while guiding others.
• Strong communication and cross‑functional collaboration skills.
• Experience integrating third‑party systems at scale and acting as the technical lead for those relationships.
• Familiarity with modern delivery practices and a deep appreciation for quality, testing, and stability.

Benefits

• Private healthcare coverage to support your…