Mako Trading on cord

Mako Trading

Platform Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Mako Trading?
CRM and Sales · Software
Markets. Technology. People.
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Cloud Engineer
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Kubernetes, Linux, Terraform, Ansible, Git
Other skills considered: Prometheus, Grafana, CI/CD, Security and Compliance

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for a Platform Engineer to help design, build, and operate our on-premises Kubernetes platform running on a self-managed Linux VM fabric (KVM/libvirt-based hypervisor layer). You'll own the infrastructure that sits beneath our application workloads - from the hypervisor and VM provisioning up through Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, and the golden-path tooling that application teams use to ship software.

This is a hands-on, deeply technical role for someone who enjoys operating infrastructure at the systems level - not a cloud-managed-service consumer role. The VM fabric itself is still being designed and built out, so you'll have real influence over its architecture, not just its day-to-day operation. You'll be responsible for keeping the fabric and the clusters running on top of it healthy, secure, and performant, without the safety net of a hyperscaler's managed control plane.


What you'll be involved in:

  • Design the Linux VM fabric underpinning the platform from the ground up: hypervisor architecture (KVM/libvirt), host networking topology, storage backing for VM disks, and how the fabric will scale as workload demand grows
  • Operate and maintain the hypervisor layer across multiple physical hosts, including host patching, live migration/evacuation, and failure response with minimal workload disruption
  • Design and maintain a distributed shared storage system such as Ceph, or an alternative
  • Design and maintain VM templating and golden-image pipelines so Kubernetes nodes are provisioned consistently and can be rebuilt or rotated on demand
  • Automate the VM lifecycle end-to-end - provisioning, scaling, patching, decommissioning - via infrastructure-as-code
  • Manage compute, memory, and storage capacity planning across the fabric, including host-level oversubscription strategy and headroom for node failure or maintenance
  • Own virtual networking within the fabric - host networking, VLANs/overlay networks - and design how it hands off cleanly into the Kubernetes CNI layer above it
  • Design, build, and maintain the full lifecycle of on-prem Kubernetes clusters: bootstrapping, version upgrades, node scaling, and decommissioning, using tooling such as kubeadm, Cluster API, or Kubespray
  • Manage the control plane end-to-end, including etcd operations (backup/restore, performance tuning, disaster recovery), since there's no managed control plane to fall back on
  • Configure and tune cluster networking: CNI selection, network policy enforcement, and on-prem load balancing
  • Stand up and manage ingress and internal DNS for workloads across environments
  • Own persistent storage integration for stateful workloads via CSI drivers
  • Define and enforce multi-tenancy patterns across both layers - tenant isolation and resource allocation on the VM fabric (compute, storage, network) as well as namespace/resource quota strategy, RBAC, and policy enforcement (OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno) at the Kubernetes layer
  • Build and maintain GitOps-based delivery for both cluster configuration and workloads (ArgoCD or Flux), treating cluster and infrastructure state as code
  • Harden hosts and clusters against security baselines (CIS benchmarks for Linux and Kubernetes), manage secrets (Vault, sealed-secrets), and keep the container runtime and node OS patched
  • Build observability across the full stack - from hypervisor/host health up through cluster metrics and logs (we currently use Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, and Checkmk; open to alternatives) - with particular focus on the capacity and failure signals a managed cloud provider would normally surface for you
  • Plan and execute Kubernetes version upgrades and node OS/kernel upgrades with minimal workload disruption
  • Design and maintain disaster recovery and backup strategy spanning both layers - VM snapshots/backups and etcd/cluster state - so the platform can be rebuilt from bare infrastructure if required
  • Troubleshoot incidents across the entire stack - from a misbehaving pod, down through kubelet, container runtime, and CNI, into the underlying VM and hypervisor layer when needed
  • Participate in an on-call rotation for platform-level incidents; drive root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews
  • Partner with application teams to define and support a smooth developer experience (self-service namespaces, CI/CD integration, internal developer platform tooling)
  • Coordinate with datacentre/facilities and network teams on physical host provisioning, rack capacity, and hardware refresh cycles
  • Contribute to the platform roadmap: capacity growth, tooling upgrades, and reducing operational toil through automation

What we need from you:


Essential

  • Solid production experience running Kubernetes in a self-managed, on-premises context (not just EKS/GKE/AKS) - you understand what breaks when there's no managed control plane, and you've operated etcd and the control plane yourself
  • Hands-on experience designing and operating a Linux KVM/libvirt-based VM fabric as the foundation for Kubernetes - host architecture, templating, and provisioning automation, ideally from relatively early stage rather than just inheriting a mature environment
  • Strong Linux systems administration background (networking, storage, service management, kernel tuning, troubleshooting under pressure)
  • Practical, in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes networking (CNI internals, service meshes a plus) and storage (CSI drivers, distributed storage systems such as Ceph/Longhorn)
  • Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, Packer)
  • Experience with GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines
  • Comfortable with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Loki) and using them to diagnose infra issues without cloud-native tooling
  • Security-conscious: familiar with hardening standards, RBAC, network segmentation, and secrets management
  • Strong troubleshooting instincts across the full stack - hypervisor, OS, network, container runtime, Kubernetes control plane
  • Good written and verbal communication; comfortable working with distributed/hybrid teams

Desirable

  • Experience with bare-metal Kubernetes provisioning
  • Background in a regulated or air-gapped/restricted-network environment
  • Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling
  • Experience using AI tooling (e.g. AI coding assistants, LLM-based automation) to accelerate development - we're keen to use AI to speed up our development cycle
  • Experience running AI infrastructure.

Company Benefits

  • Flexible leave and flexible working policies
  • Private health and dental insurance
  • Generous pension scheme
  • Free access to the Mako gym
  • Employee wellbeing guidance and support
  • Opportunity to become involved in the rewarding work of the Mako Foundation
Platform Engineer at Mako Trading
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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