Vetted on a call by a Wave consultant, not scraped. £120,000 and above.
Leads 60 people across 6 squads with 7 direct reports on a government cloud platform, and holds active SC clearance valid to 2036. The record before that is enterprise developer platforms in regulated financial services, large scale CI/CD transformations, Terraform automation and Kubernetes enablement. GitLab CI, Jenkins, SonarQube and HashiCorp Vault across the pipeline, AWS and OpenStack underneath.
Looking forWants to keep the clearance active and wants long-term stability with real leadership scope. Flexible on most other things.
How they came acrossCalled one of the finest agile coaches by a former colleague at a global exchange group, and that matched our read. Currently weighing a contract option at £850 a day outside IR35, so a permanent offer has to earn its place.
AWS, OpenStack, Kubernetes, OpenShift · Terraform, Ansible, Packer, Python, Bash · GitLab CI, Jenkins, Vault
Fifteen years across 8 employers, mostly regulated financial services including a global exchange group, a UK retail bank and a Saudi commercial bank, now government. Average tenure 1 year 6 months with a longest stint of 6 years 10 months.
A contract option at £850 a day outside IR35 is already on the table. Two months notice on file, though they told us it could be as short as a week. Keeping SC clearance is non-negotiable.
BSc in information technology. ITIL, GitLab CI/CD and project management certified.
SRE and backend at Apple, Facebook and Goldman Sachs, across 25 years of large scale infrastructure. Observability is the specialism, with Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo and Loki, plus Istio service mesh, Kubernetes cluster management and cost optimisation programmes. Writes Java, Scala, Python and Go, and has worked down into the Linux kernel, HBase and Cassandra.
Looking forWants an individual contributor track with real architecture influence, at a company with a proven product and a working business model. Strategic work, not a support queue.
How they came acrossSelective, and entitled to be. The platform team went from 5 people to 2 or 3 and then to just them with no manager, and day to day support swallowed everything strategic. Not bitter about it, just finished.
Kubernetes, Istio, Terraform, Linux · Java, Scala, Python, Go · Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, Kafka
Twenty-nine years across 12 employers, from Swedish software houses and a CTO role into Apple, Facebook, a music streaming business and Goldman Sachs, latterly a hedge fund and now security tooling. Average tenure 2 years 1 month with a longest stint of 4 years.
£200,000 base is the starting point. Rules out early-stage startups without a proven business model, traditional banking, hedge funds, and TypeScript-heavy roles.
Computer science study, no completed degree on file.
Came into platform work from full stack, which shows in how they treat engineers as users. At an AI startup they built the usage-based billing platform, stood up on-call from scratch, defined the platform maturity initiative and contributed to SOC2. TypeScript throughout, serverless on AWS Lambda and EventBridge, with Datadog for tracing, replay and alerting.
Looking forWants a scale-up with obvious momentum and a clear direction. Planned projects got cancelled where they are and the uncertainty is the whole push.
How they came acrossMeasures their own work by friction removed. At a previous fintech they built a CPQ system that gave sales reps back roughly 20 hours a month each, and that is the sort of number they reach for unprompted.
TypeScript, Node.js, React, Kotlin · AWS Lambda, EventBridge, Pulumi, Docker · Postgres, BigQuery, Datadog, Sentry
Eight years across 7 employers, from freelance web work and a WordPress hosting business into hotel booking, an expense management fintech and now an AI startup. Average tenure 1 year 11 months with a longest stint of 5 years 1 month.
Two months notice. The stack is TypeScript and serverless rather than Kubernetes, so a container-heavy platform team would be a stretch.
Masters in computer science.
Tell me which came closest and I recalibrate, then come back with 10 to 15 more inside 24 hours.
Show me the wider bank