Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead

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Please note that these positions are based in London, Berlin or Paris — relocation support is provided if required.

THE BEST WORK OF YOUR CAREER

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe — we operate in 18 countries, serving +10 million customers who trust us with over €150B in assets. But we're striving for more.

We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.

We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 400 engineers can ship with confidence. From Kubernetes fleet management and CI/CD to an internal Developer Hub built on Backstage, our work underpins every trade, savings plan, and card payment that flows through the platform.

THE KUBERNETES PLATFORM JOURNEYTrade Republic runs a growing fleet of Kubernetes clusters across multiple AWS accounts and environments, underpinning every service that millions of customers depend on. Managing that fleet at the pace the business demands — with the reliability and compliance bar a regulated financial institution requires — made it clear that treating clusters as manually managed infrastructure was no longer an option.

We changed that. We built a hub-and-spoke fleet management platform — ClusterAPI for cluster lifecycle, Crossplane for the infrastructure control plane, Sveltos for addon orchestration, all driven by GitOps from a single source of truth. A new cluster is now a single resource definition. Addons are versioned packages, deployed automatically to every cluster in the fleet. Operational complexity no longer grows with the number of clusters.

The foundation is in place. Now we need to take it further: hardening the platform, expanding to multi-region, pushing availability targets to meet mission-critical service requirements, and making the fleet truly self-healing by default. You will lead that next chapter.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

As Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead, you will set the direction, own the outcomes, and lead the team building the infrastructure layer that every engineer at Trade Republic depends on to deploy and scale their services with confidence.

• Set the availability standard: Define the cluster topology and isolation model that gets mission-critical services to their availability targets — dedicated clusters per criticality tier, strict failure boundaries between platform and product workloads, and a disaster recovery posture that has been tested and proven.
• Own the networking architecture: Define the multi-account network fabric the entire fleet runs on — VPC design, private endpoints, cross-account connectivity, and the path toward cross-region and multi-cloud. Ensure services communicate reliably and securely across the entire fleet, regardless of where they run.
• Drive toward zero-touch fleet operations: Own the engineering roadmap that turns cluster and addon management into fully automated, self-healing workflows — where a new cluster is a resource definition and an addon rollout is a versioned profile applied across the entire fleet without manual intervention.
• Define the compute contract with product teams: Set the standards for how workloads run on the platform — resource policies, cluster profiles, workload isolation boundaries — and build the guardrails that prevent the noisy neighbour problem before it reaches production.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, ensuring full end-to-end ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction and drive it forward: Define the long-term Kubernetes platform strategy, drive cross-team initiatives from kickoff to delivery, and align infrastructure decisions with broader engineering, compliance, and cost goals.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related SRE/systems discipline, with a track record of technical leadership.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise: cluster architecture, scaling, security, and HA design in production environments.
• Strong networking mastery: CNI, ingress, DNS, service mesh, and cross-region/cross-cloud connectivity.
• Proven experience operating multi-region, multi-cloud environments at scale.
• Experience automating the full cluster lifecycle — provisioning, upgrades, policy, and governance — with self-service enablement for developers.
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome.
• A track record of turning infrastructure best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive cross-team initiatives end-to-end, and hold yourself and others accountable to outcomes.
• Ability to contribute to architectural decisions and clearly communicate trade-offs to both engineers and leadership.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.

WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW

Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable — we're here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face — closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out!

We believe it’s our team’s varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. We’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels respected and has equal opportunity to thrive in their careers. For any questions on DEI during the interview process, reach out to your recruitment partner.