We’re Acquired.com

Acquired.com are a next-generation payments business focused on powering recurring commerce.

Our next-generation payment infrastructure and solutions unify and optimise customers' payment ecosystem, providing a competitive advantage and helping them achieve their goals in the digital economy.

We combine this capability with exceptional sector expertise and a highly personal, tailored service focused on long-term partnerships with our customers.

We’re scaling as a business, so if you thrive in an environment that’s constantly evolving, where purpose-driven culture is seen as an enabler to achieve the extraordinary and where our unique differences are celebrated, we could be the place for you!

Your Mission

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you play a key role in designing, building, and evolving the platform that powers our engineering teams. Working within a small, high-performance platform team, you take ownership of critical infrastructure, tooling, and automation — ensuring our platform is secure, scalable, and developer-friendly.

You go beyond execution — you influence technical direction, drive architectural decisions, and mentor team members. Your focus is on delivering a platform that enables rapid product delivery without compromising reliability, security, or performance. You operate with a strong sense of ownership, proactively identifying and resolving systemic issues, and you are a trusted technical leader within your domain. 

Key Responsibilities

Platform Development & Enablement:

• Design, build, and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and GCP, making informed architectural decisions that balance technical trade-offs with business priorities.

• Lead the development and evolution of our Kubernetes-based platform, including service mesh, deployment tooling, and runtime configuration.

• Own and drive improvements to developer self-service capabilities (e.g. deployments, secrets management, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning).

• Champion infrastructure-as-code and configuration-as-code best practices across the engineering organisation.

• Identify and address systemic technical debt, improving long-term sustainability and maintainability of platform systems.

• Automate routine operational tasks to reduce manual effort and increase reliability at scale.

Operations & Reliability:

• Lead incident response and drive thorough postmortems related to platform and infrastructure, ensuring lessons are captured and acted upon.

• Design and improve observability across the platform using Datadog and other tooling — ensuring systems are observable by default.

• Proactively improve system reliability, availability, and security through well-considered enhancements and fast feedback loops.

• Troubleshoot complex issues across the full stack — from OS to application layer — to unblock product teams.

• Design and execute capacity, load, and volume testing strategies to ensure systems scale under peak demand.

• Collaborate with product teams to simulate real-world traffic patterns, identify platform bottlenecks, and use test data to inform autoscaling, resource allocation, and architecture decisions.

• Work as part of an incident response rota to resolve incidents that occur outside of business hours.

Technical Leadership & Innovation:

• Influence architectural decisions and technical direction for the platform domain.

• Advocate for best practices in infrastructure quality, testing, security, and maintainability.

• Stay ahead of industry trends in cloud-native technologies, platform engineering, and developer experience — proposing innovative solutions to real problems.

• Lead technical discussions and help drive consensus on complex platform challenges.

Collaboration & Communication:

• Work closely with product engineers to understand pain points and reduce friction in the development lifecycle.

• Communicate technical changes, runbooks, and best practices clearly through documentation and Slack.

• Participate in planning and estimation of platform improvements and roadmap items, helping to align platform strategy with business goals.

• Collaborate across teams and disciplines to solve ambiguous, cross-cutting problems.

Mentorship & Growth:

• Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of learning, ownership, and technical excellence.

• Provide technical guidance and coaching to elevate overall team capability.

• Lead by example in demonstrating ownership, accountability, and collaboration.

Skills and Experience

• Extensive experience in platform or infrastructure engineering, with a strong track record of delivering scalable, reliable systems.

• Solid experience working with Linux (preferably Rocky or similar enterprise distros).

• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), including networking, IAM, and compute services.

• Deep proficiency with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code concepts.

• Strong experience with Kubernetes (including Helm or Kustomize) and service mesh tooling.

• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, etc.).

• Strong working knowledge of observability tools such as Datadog for logs, metrics, and alerts.

• Comfortable writing scripts in Bash and working with other languages (e.g. C#, Python, or Go) where needed.

• Experience with load and performance testing tools (e.g. k6, Locust, JMeter, or similar).

• Ability to design and interpret capacity tests to inform scaling and resilience strategies.

• Strong understanding of CPU/memory/network utilisation patterns in distributed systems.

• Experience making architectural decisions that balance technical trade-offs with business priorities.

• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and debugging skills across complex distributed systems.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with a proactive approach to mentoring and knowledge sharing.

Success Measures

• Delivery of high-impact infrastructure and tooling that directly improves developer velocity and autonomy.

• Measurable reduction in manual operations and platform-related incidents.

• Platform systems are observable, secure, and scalable by default.

• Positive feedback from product teams around ease of deployment and platform usability.

• Active leadership in postmortems, incident resolution, and reliability improvements.

• Measurable contributions to team mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and technical excellence.

• Reduction in systemic technical debt and improvements in platform maintainability.

• Effective collaboration across teams to align platform capabilities with business goals.

• Platform availability and performance are maintained to a standard that protects merchant experience, with rapid resolution and clear communication when issues arise.