Senior Infrastructure Architect & Team Lead

Working at CreateFuture CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference  while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years. Our UK Benefits  * 35 days leave (including bank holidays).  * Private medical insurance. * Enhanced parental and adoption leave.  * Financial coaching + 5% pension match. * 40 hours of paid learning and development.  View our full list of UK benefits.  CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.   About the role and team: At CreateFuture, our Lead Engineer - Cloud plays a pivotal role in supporting the success of our Cloud engineers, our clients, and internal projects. Working closely with clients, you are responsible for the successful delivery of client and internal projects by building professional relationships with key client stakeholders, challenging where appropriate. Use your technical expertise to provide best practice advice and processes within your project team and the wider capability. As our client demands expand from traditional cloud migrations to AI enablement and platform engineering, you will lead the charge in building autonomous platforms, managing AI lifecycles, and enforcing strict cost governance across cloud estates. You are seen as a leader internally and externally, through your technical expertise, guidance, and professionalism, both on and off a client. Alongside delivering for your customers, you will also support and mentor a team of cloud engineers to encourage their growth. You will be setting the technical direction of the team alongside Cloud Leads and Senior Engineers. Key responsibilities: CONSULTANCY & ADVISORY * Growth Mindset: Apply a growth mindset to identify new revenue opportunities on client accounts, working alongside the commercial team to successfully land additional work. * Pre-Sales Contribution: Lead and contribute to pre-sales activities, RFPs, and BIDs, accounting for up to 5% to 10% of the role. Engage with the commercial team to drive high-value Cloud and Data advisory roles. * Ambassadorial Presence: Act as an ambassador for CreateFuture in the public space, attending events, speaking, blogging, or leveraging social media to support the growth of the Cloud capability. * Hands-on: you are an experienced engineer and can be active with the cloud platform tools, software development and writing efficient code for clients.   TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP & PLATFORM SUPPORT * Technical Direction: Take responsibility for the technical direction and delivery of single or multiple client and internal project teams, acting as either a technical lead or a solo contributor. * AI-Native Infrastructure: Architect and implement the core engineering infrastructure required to run AI workloads reliably, moving client architectures from static data lakes to dynamic Vector Databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. * Agentic Development: Build production-grade Agentic Workflows and custom AI agents, utilising advanced toolsets to bridge the widening market implementation gap. * Setting Development Best Practices: Define, promote, and establish best practice tools, security approaches, and common service patterns across the entire CreateFuture organisation. Ensure Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the organisational default and challenge inefficient legacy processes. * FinOps & Governance: Enforce strict automated security and cost controls, real-time cost-anomaly detection, and cost estimation into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as a standard. Understanding of OpenTelemetry or other telemetry approaches. * Internal Platform Support: Assist the Capability Lead and architects in defining and delivering an internal collection of reusable components, reference architectures, and Proof of Concepts (PoCs). Supporting the internal IT function in helping other parts of the business use Cloud services. LEADING & MENTORING * Culture & Collaboration: Lead by example, creating a culture of open, honest feedback, collaboration, ownership, and accountability. * People Development: Create a psychologically safe environment for the team that enables them to grow by supporting their development journeys and career aspirations. * Capability Growth: Work alongside the Capability Lead and Director of Cloud and Data to identify missing or inconsistent skills within the department, supporting team members through tiered certification journeys. * Recruitment: Collaborate with Talent Acquisition through the recruitment process, including conducting interviews, candidate debriefs, and strategic decision-making to attract top talent. Skills & Experience CORE TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES Candidates must demonstrate a hybrid skillset, balancing Software Engineering (30%), Platform/SRE (40%), and Data Engineering (30%), with a core focus on Security, Governance, and Cost Management. * Cloud & Infrastructure (40%): Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) via Terraform, advanced Kubernetes administration (clusters, nodes, pods), hardcore networking (VPC peering, Service Mesh, Zero Trust security), and solution architecture experience, with a cost-optimisation mindset. * Software Engineering, Agentic & AI Development (30%): Solid software engineer principles (pipelines, toolsets, testing, linting, vulnerability scanning, etc.) Production-level experience with tools such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS AgentCore, Azure AI Studio, LangChain, and writing automation scripts or custom AI agents using node or python. * Data Engineering (30%): Experience deploying and maintaining data orchestration toolsets (e.g., dbt, Apache Airflow), ETL/ELT methodologies, real-time streaming (e.g., AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka), Vector databases, and RAG architectures. * Observability & FinOps: Experience implementing modern observability tooling (OpenTelemetry) alongside automated cost-control systems (such as Karpenter, Infracost, OpenCost, or Cloud Custodian). DOMAIN & SECTOR EXPERIENCE * Regulated Industries: Experience working in highly regulated sectors such as Financial Services or iGaming is helpful, demonstrating an understanding of strict compliance, data privacy risks, and governance guardrails. * Consulting: Proven background in a client-facing consulting capacity, managing stakeholders, handling commercial realities, and meeting strict SLAs, timescales, and budgets. PREFERRED KNOWLEDGE-LEVEL & CERTIFICATIONS * Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). * Multiple professional-level certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Azure Architect AZ-305.) * Beneficial for AWS GenAI Developer Professional, AWS ML Engineer Associate, or Azure AI Engineer Associate. * FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP). WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!

ABOUT TIDE At Tide, we help SMEs save time and money in the running of their businesses by not only offering business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of highly usable and connected administrative solutions, from invoicing to accounting. Tide is transforming the small business banking market and now supports over 2 million members globally across the UK, India, Germany and France. Using advanced technology, all solutions are designed with SMEs in mind. With quick onboarding, low fees and innovative features, we thrive on making data driven decisions to serve our mission: to help SMEs save time and money so they can get back to doing what they love. Tide facts: * Tide is available for UK, Indian, German and French SMEs * Over 2 million members: 900,000 UK and 1,100,000 in India and growing rapidly * Over $300 million raised in funding * Over 2,800 Tideans globally * Recognised with Great Place to Work certification three years in a row, and among India’s Top 50 Best Workplaces in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance in 2026 * We have offices in Central London, with a member support and technology centre in Sofia, Bulgaria, technology centres in Serbia, Romania, Lithuania and Hyderabad and offices in Gurugram, New Delhi, Berlin, Paris and Luxembourg ABOUT THE TEAM: The Ongoing Monitoring team sits at the core of Tide’s trust and safety ecosystem, building the systems that power our fraud detection, financial risk, and regulatory compliance capabilities. As Tide continues to scale, the team is responsible for designing and evolving intelligent, resilient, and adaptive platforms that protect our members and keep the business safe. Working closely with Product, Data Science, Design, Compliance, and Operations, the team combines deep technical expertise with a strong focus on member experience, ensuring that our risk and monitoring capabilities are both effective and intuitive. This is a high-impact area at a pivotal stage of Tide’s growth, offering the opportunity to shape the future of AI-driven fraud and risk management at scale. ABOUT THE ROLE:  As Head of Machine Learning you will: * Define and execute a risk engineering strategy: develop plans that align with Tide’s long-term vision to ensure that our approach to risk supports rapid and compliant growth. * Lead a team of talented managers and engineers: foster a culture of excellence, innovation, user-centric design, and collaboration in our engineering team. * Build and scale risk infrastructure: architect and scale foundational risk systems to support real-time decision-making, effective data management, and advanced fraud prevention. * Develop self-service tools for internal teams: empower product, compliance, and risk operations teams with extensive and user-friendly risk tooling, enabling independent monitoring and management of risk processes and reducing dependencies for day-to-day operations. * Support compliance and regulatory standards: collaborate with legal and compliance experts to keep Tide a compliance leader in an evolving regulatory climate. * Champion data-driven risk management: lead initiatives to leverage data and machine learning in fraud detection and compliance, providing Tide with actionable insights and automated solutions that improve our resilience. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: * Proven leadership in engineering: 12+ years of engineering experience with at least 2 years in a senior leadership role (e.g., head, director, or senior manager), ideally within fintech or regulated technology environments. * Risk and compliance expertise: deep experience in fraud prevention and compliance (KYC/KYB, AML), ideally within the financial services industry. * Machine Learning: Strong experience in supervised and unsupervised models, decision trees, neural networks, and Large Language Models (LLMs). * Agent Frameworks: Hands-on experience with multi-agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen) used to build self-correcting compliance workflows. * Fintech Domain Knowledge: Deep understanding of fraud vectors (e.g., mule accounts, account takeovers, synthetic identity fraud) and AML typologies. * Adversarial AI Security: Proven track record in detecting deepfakes, synthetic identities, and prompt injection attacks targeting financial systems. * Risk/Scale: Minimum 3+ years building and deploying production-grade, risk-scoring environments at scale. * Experience with fintech platforms -  risk/compliance tooling (AML, Fraud, Financial Risk, SARs, KYX, agentic AI detections ) * Excellent people leadership skills – you know how to grow and inspire teams. * Solid technical foundations: cloud-native architectures, microservices, event-driven systems, and data platforms (AWS or GCP). WHAT YOU’LL GET IN RETURN: Our location-specific employee benefits are designed to cater to the unique needs of Tideans:  * Competitive Compensation -  competitive salary and share options * Time Off – Generous annual leave on top of bank holidays. * Parental Leave – Paid maternity, paternity, and adoption leave to support your family journey. * Sabbatical – Extended unpaid and paid leave options after completing milestone years with Tide. * Health Insurance – Private family insurance with additional OPD coverage and top-up options. * Life & Accident Cover – Comprehensive accidental and life insurance protection. * Mental Wellbeing – Access to therapy sessions, courses, meditations, and workshops. * Volunteering & Development Days – Paid days annually for volunteering or personal growth. * Learning & Development – Annual budget for books, courses, coaching, and more. * WOO (Work Outside the Office) – Work from abroad for up to 90 days annually. * Home Office Setup – Contribution towards setting up your home office * Laptop Ownership – Keep your old laptop and get a new one when it’s time for a replacement. * Snacks & Meals – Office perks with snacks, coffee, tea, and lunch (location dependent). TIDEAN WAYS OF WORKING At Tide, we champion a flexible workplace model that supports both in-person and remote work to cater to the specific needs of our different teams.  While remote work is supported, we believe in the power of face-to-face interactions to foster team spirit and collaboration. Our offices are designed as hubs for innovation and team-building, where we encourage regular in-person gatherings to foster a strong sense of community. TIDE IS A PLACE FOR EVERYONE At Tide, we believe that we can only succeed if we let our differences enrich our culture. Our Tideans come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. We consider everyone irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity or differently-abled status. We celebrate diversity in our workforce as a cornerstone of our success. Our commitment to a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds is what enables us to build products that resonate with our members’ diverse needs and lives.  We are One Team and foster a transparent and inclusive environment, where everyone’s voice is heard.   At Tide, we thrive on diversity, embracing various backgrounds and experiences. We welcome all individuals regardless of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. Our inclusive culture is key to our success, helping us build products that meet our members' diverse needs. We are One Team, committed to transparency and ensuring everyone’s voice is heard.   Disclaimer   It has come to our attention that individuals or agencies are falsely claiming to represent Tide and are reaching out to candidates regarding job opportunities. Please be aware that: * Tide does not charge any fees at any stage of the recruitment process. * All official Tide job opportunities are listed exclusively on our Careers Page and applications should be submitted through this channel. * Communication from Tide will only come from an official @tide.co email address. * Tide does not work with agencies or recruiters without prior formal engagement, and we do not authorize third parties to make job offers on our behalf. If you are contacted by anyone misrepresenting Tide or requesting payment, please treat it as fraudulent and report it to us immediately at talent@tide.co Your safety and trust are important to us, and we are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent recruitment process.   Tide leverages AI to enhance our hiring experience. You can read more about how we use AI in our recruitment process in our AI Policy. Your personal data will be processed by Tide for recruitment purposes and in accordance with Tide's Recruitment Privacy Notice.