Head of Platform EngineeringUp to £225,000

About the Role

Model ML builds AI systems that automate how major financial institutions produce and validate client-ready work — turning complex, manual analysis into automated workflows used by global banks, private equity and credit firms on their most sensitive data. That workload is only as good as the infrastructure under it, and this is the first platform leadership hire brought in to own it. You'll set and drive the end-to-end cloud strategy, architect and scale their Azure / AKS environment, and build the platform team from the ground up as the product grows into more demanding financial-services deployments.

This is a high-ownership role at the point where reliability, security and compliance directly enable the product. You'll build and maintain CI/CD across backend, frontend and data services, drive product-wide observability and on-call, and lead the company through SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits — implementing the security, secrets management and compliance measures that customer and regulatory (GDPR / FCA) expectations demand. Unlike a platform role at a larger, settled company, you're defining the standards here rather than inheriting them, with the mandate and the funding to do it properly.

What They're Looking For

• You have 10+ years in infrastructure / platform engineering, including architecting and operating production-grade Kubernetes and Terraform environments at scale.
• You've built and scaled engineering teams in high-growth startup environments, and you set the technical bar through hiring and mentoring.
• You've owned infrastructure end-to-end — from architecture through production support — including observability (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) and on-call.
• You've implemented reliability, security and compliance measures ahead of scale-up, and navigated frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 or GDPR.
• You're hands-on with cloud networking (VPCs, private networking, DNS, load balancers, VPNs, firewalls) and provisioning production databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, NoSQL), with strong Python or Bash for automation.
• You thrive in a fast-paced, high-ownership culture and stay effective as priorities and timelines shift.

About Model ML

Model ML is the AI workflow builder transforming how major financial institutions produce and validate client-ready work. Model ML converts complex, manual processes into fully automated AI systems that scale across global teams. In under a year, Model ML has become one of the fastest growing enterprise AI platforms worldwide and recently closed a $75 million Series A, one of the largest fintech Series A rounds ever. The round was backed by FT Partners, Y Combinator, LocalGlobe, QED, 13books, and other top global investors, bringing total funding to $90 million.