Principal Cloud Engineer AWS/Multiple

Hello. We’re Teya. Teya was founded on a simple belief: local businesses deserve better. They are the cafés, restaurants, salons, shops and entrepreneurs that bring character to our high streets, create jobs and keep communities moving. Yet for too long, financial services has made life harder for them - with clunky tools, poor support and complexity that gets in the way of running a business. Teya exists to change that. We’re building a financial platform for local businesses across Europe - one built around simple tools, thoughtful design and real human support. Our Members rely on us to help them run their business with confidence, and that responsibility shapes the way we work. We move fast. We care about quality. We stay close to the detail. And we believe great performance and genuine hospitality should go hand in hand. If you want to build meaningful products, solve real problems and make a genuine difference for local businesses, we’d love to hear from you YOUR MISSION Small businesses are the backbone of our communities — yet they remain underserved by traditional banks and legacy payment providers. As a Principal Backend Engineer, you will play a defining role in changing that. Your mission is to design and build the resilient, scalable fintech infrastructure that underpins our most critical business initiatives. This isn’t about owning a single service — it’s about owning outcomes. You will drive the technical success of the platforms that power payments, merchant onboarding, transaction processing, and operational workflows across Europe. You’ll operate at the intersection of engineering and business strategy, shaping systems that must be secure, compliant, highly available, and capable of scaling with rapid growth. The decisions you make will directly influence how quickly we can launch new products, enter new markets, and serve thousands of merchants. This role goes beyond technical leadership. You will define and evolve the architectural foundations that multiple teams depend on, bringing clarity to ambiguity and ensuring our most important initiatives succeed. WHAT YOU’LL DO * Own and drive the architecture behind our most critical platforms, ensuring they scale with the business and unlock new capabilities * Design and evolve high-scale, cloud-native systems powering payments and merchant experiences * Lead the development of resilient, secure, and compliant services for high-volume transaction processing * Shape and drive adoption of modern backend practices (Java 17/21, Spring Boot 3, Kotlin, clean architecture) * Architect event-driven systems (Kafka) that enable scalable, decoupled domains across teams * Define and enforce standards for API-first development (REST/gRPC) and domain-driven design (DDD) * Set the bar for availability, performance, fault tolerance, and observability across critical systems * Partner deeply with Product, Data, and leadership to translate business priorities into scalable technical strategy * Lead cross-organisational initiatives that are essential to company growth and market expansion * Influence engineering direction through hands-on contribution, design leadership, and mentorship * Bring structure to ambiguity across technical, regulatory, and operational domains WHAT YOU BRING * 8+ years of experience building and operating distributed, production-grade backend systems * Proven track record operating at Senior Staff or Principal level, driving architecture across multiple teams or domains * Deep expertise in Java (17+), Spring Boot, and modern backend engineering practices * Strong experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous systems * Experience building systems for high throughput, low latency, and reliability, ideally in fintech or transaction-heavy environments * Strong grounding in system design, data structures, and performance trade-offs * Hands-on experience with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production environments * Proven ability to implement observability, resilience patterns, and CI/CD best practices * Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence and align stakeholders * A track record of mentoring senior engineers and leading through ambiguity   The Perks * We trust you, so we offer flexible working hours, as long it suits both you and your team; * Physical and mental health support through our partnership with GymPass giving free access to over 1,500 gyms in the UK, 1-1 therapy, meditation sessions, digital fitness and nutrition apps; * Our company offers extended and improved maternity and paternity leave choices, giving employees more flexibility and support; * Cycle-to-Work Scheme; * Health and Life Insurance; * Pension Scheme; * 25 days of Annual Leave (+ Bank Holidays); * Office snacks every day; * Friendly, comfortable and informal office environment in Central London. Teya is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, or background can thrive and do their best work. We believe that a diverse team leads to better ideas, stronger outcomes, and a more supportive workplace for all. If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process whether for interviews, assessments, or other parts of the application—we encourage you to let us know. We are committed to ensuring that every candidate has a fair and accessible experience with us.

ABOUT MOTORWAY Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace - our online-only platform connects private car sellers with thousands of verified dealers nationwide, ensuring everyone gets the best deal. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding. This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better. ABOUT THE TEAM GenAI Engineering sits within Motorway's Data and AI function, alongside Machine Learning and the Machine Learning Data Platform. The team owns the GenAI features that shape how buyers and sellers experience the marketplace, spanning agentic workflows in the customer experience and LLM-powered tooling for our dealer network. Over the next two years the function scales from shipping AI features into running a serious GenAI platform. This hire is the technical authority who'll help shape that platform, working closely with engineering leadership across Data and AI and the wider Engineering org. ABOUT THE ROLE This is the most senior individual contributor role on Motorway's GenAI engineering ladder (IC5 / Principal). You'll report to the Director of Data and AI, advising the CPO and the wider exec on AI technical strategy. The remit is the trajectory of GenAI engineering at Motorway over a two-to-three-year horizon: the architecture, the standards and the strategic bets that no single team can absorb on its own. You'll set architectural direction across the GenAI surface area, hold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, and have the credibility to veto implementations that don't meet our agreed technical, safety or quality bar. You'll shape the high-stakes calls on vendor strategy, model selection, build-vs-buy on platform infrastructure, and our responsible-AI posture, providing the technical rationale that lets the Director of Data and AI and the wider exec land those calls with confidence. This is still a hands-on engineering role: you'll design and build the hardest single pieces of work directly, write production code on the systems that matter most, and pair with senior engineers on the architectural decisions that will outlast specific features. You won't own all AI usage at Motorway, you won't own overall AI strategy, and you won't hold budget for AI infrastructure, but you'll contribute meaningfully to all three, and you'll define how GenAI is built and evaluated here. This is a newly-created role and a greenfield opportunity. The technical bets you make will sit behind Motorway's most strategic AI initiatives, including ones not yet started. AI engineering choices at this level shape unit economics for years. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: * Set the overarching architecture for GenAI at Motorway, including reusable patterns for prompt design, RAG (hybrid retrieval, chunking, semantic caching), agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks (LLM-as-judge, golden datasets, adversarial prompts), guardrails and observability that other teams build on * Design and build the hardest single pieces of work directly, taking on the problems nobody else is well-placed to solve and leading our highest-risk, highest-reward technical bets across the GenAI surface area * Hold sign-off on architectural decisions for materially complex GenAI systems, with the credibility to veto implementations that don't meet our agreed technical, safety or quality bar * Advise the Director of Data and AI on build-vs-buy calls for AI infrastructure (vector stores, eval platforms, AI gateways, model routers, agent frameworks), and own the technical rationale behind them * Drive cost, latency and throughput optimisation across our production GenAI systems, with the trade-offs documented and explicit * Define our principles for emerging paradigms, including multi-agent protocols, multimodal systems and agent-to-agent communication * Define our responsible AI principles and keep us aligned with the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ICO guidance ahead of regulatory deadlines * Own opinionated relationships with our model and infrastructure providers, with the credibility to influence vendor roadmaps where it matters to us * Coach engineers across the function, shape how we hire and review, and set the cultural bar for safety, evaluation and production quality * Identify what Motorway should stop pursuing with the same clarity as what we should start, and represent Motorway externally through publications, conference talks and meaningful open-source contributions, used as a multiplier for hiring and partnerships ABOUT YOU * Typically 8+ years building production AI/ML systems, with at least 2 years at the cutting edge of GenAI, and a track record of company-scale technical bets that have materially shifted a business's trajectory * Strong engineering fundamentals and comfort working directly in code: Python and modern API-driven architectures on cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), with the production engineering instincts (CI/CD, observability, SLOs, cost attribution) to take prototypes through to hardened production * Current, hands-on expertise across the GenAI stack: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG (hybrid retrieval, chunking strategy, semantic caching, re-ranking), agentic architectures (multi-step, multi-agent, tool use, memory), evaluation frameworks, LLMOps and fine-tuning * Deep understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations, including how models fail in your domain, what hallucination and prompt injection look like in practice, and how to design evals that catch them * Experience setting architectural standards adopted across multiple engineering teams over multiple years * High-stakes build-vs-buy judgment, with a clear story of where you've been right and where you've been wrong * Strategic grasp of responsible AI and AI governance, with practical experience aligning engineering decisions to NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act or comparable frameworks * Calm, direct communication with executive and board-level audiences, with the ability to compress technical complexity into the decisions leadership needs to make * Coaching credibility with senior engineers, who have grown materially under your influence * Self-awareness as a leadership trait; you know the limits of your knowledge and pull in outside expertise before that becomes a problem YOU COULD BE A GREAT FIT IF * You have an external technical presence (publications, well-known open-source contributions or conference talks) and use it as a multiplier for hiring and partnerships * You've led an organisation through a major AI paradigm shift in a previous role * You have working knowledge of the ML Engineering and platform layer (serving infrastructure, AI gateways, cost attribution, multi-model routing) that GenAI features run on top of * You've advised commercial leadership on vendor and partnership strategy, including contract and data-rights negotiation * You've worked in a regulated, safety-critical or trust-heavy domain where AI behaviour has material business or legal consequence WE OFFER A FANTASTIC RANGE OF BENEFITS TO HELP YOU THRIVE: * Great work-life balance * Office location with regular social events, office drinks and free snacks to keep you going * Flexibility to work from home up to 1 day per week to help nail that work-life balance * Stock options so you can share in Motorway's growth and future success * Pension scheme to plan for your future with our provider NEST * Strong commitment to your personal development including budget for books, courses, conferences, etc * Opt-in comprehensive health insurance through BUPA and fitness discounts * Cycle to work scheme - save big ££ on a new bike and accessories * One paid volunteering day a year for you to use as you wish * Generous parental benefits including 6 months full paid maternity leave, 4 weeks paternity leave and workplace nursery scheme... and much more! BENEFITS We've got your back, in life's biggest moments and the everyday ones too. * Competitive salary * Equity scheme - we all share in Motorway's success * 25 days holiday * Flexible working (2 days a week in our London office, with socials and snacks galore) * Private medical insurance via BUPA * Life assurance * Pension scheme (we contribute 5%) * Enhanced family leave (e.g. 26 weeks full pay for maternity or adoption) * 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme * EV leasing scheme * Cycle to work scheme * Nursery salary sacrifice scheme * 1 paid volunteering day a year