Engineering Manager (Platform)

Ripjar specialises in the development of software and data products that help governments and organisations combat serious financial crime. Our technology is used to identify criminal activity such as money laundering (AML) and terrorist financing (CTF), enabling organisations to enforce sanctions at scale to help combat rogue entities and state actors.

We are a remote‑first team, with a head office based in Cheltenham. This position is open to UK‑wide candidates. If you are based near Cheltenham, you are more than welcome to work from our office at any time.

Team Mission

Ripjar's Platform Engineering and Operations team builds and runs the foundational systems that power our products. We ensure our services are reliable, secure, scalable, and observable – enabling our product engineering teams to innovate quickly and deliver mission‑critical software that helps make the world safer.

What you’ll be doing

As Engineering Manager of our Platform Team, you’ll lead a multidisciplinary group of eight engineers focused on delivering highly available, secure, and efficient public/private cloud platforms. You’ll provide direction, structure, and clarity, ensuring the stability and scalability of Ripjar’s services while driving continuous improvement in our operational practices.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of platform and operations engineers delivering the public/private cloud infrastructure, automation, and observability capabilities that underpin Ripjar’s mission‑critical products.
• Coach, mentor, and develop your team through regular 1:1s, feedback, and tailored growth plans. Champion psychological safety and a culture of accountability and clarity.
• Own and drive security, reliability and scalability objectives to ensure our production systems are secure, highly available and fault tolerant.
• Oversee operational excellence, including incident management, root‑cause analysis and continuous improvement of system reliability.
• Refine and evolve platform processes such as deployment pipelines, change management and observability practices to drive speed and stability as we deploy new capabilities.
• Foster a DevOps culture, empowering engineering teams to own their services end‑to‑end while providing robust shared tooling and automation frameworks.
• Guide your team as they set the direction for engineering in areas such as infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC), CI/CD, container orchestration and cloud‑native architectures.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with Product, Engineering, Security, Data and Delivery teams to ensure our infrastructure supports evolving product needs and compliance standards.
• Contribute to the wider engineering community, sharing best practices around operational excellence, monitoring and resilience.

Ideal for

• Highly organised and structured, with a passion for reliability, scalability and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable leading technical discussions while maintaining focus on people, process and outcomes.
• Motivated by building high‑performing teams with a strong sense of accountability and ownership.
• A strong communicator who values clarity, process and professional standards.

Requirements

• Strong experience in engineering leadership, with a track record of implementing process improvements and raising operational standards.
• Proven experience leading platform, SRE or DevOps teams working in a hybrid public / private cloud environment.
• Familiarity with relevant technologies and platforms – AWS, Proxmox, Spark, HBASE, HDFS, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Kubernetes.
• Skilled in agile delivery, incident management and balancing operational priorities with longer‑term company objectives.
• Thought leadership to engage confidently with engineers on design decisions, architecture and trade‑offs.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary DOE.
• Fully remote working with occasional travel.
• 25 days annual leave + your birthday off and Christmas shutdown, rising to 30 days after 5 years of service.
• 35‑hour working week.
• Flexible working hours.
• Life assurance.
• Private family healthcare.
• Employee assistance programme.
• Company contributions to your pension.
• Enhanced maternity/paternity pay.
• The latest tech including a top‑of‑the‑range MacBook Pro.
• Office equipped with a well‑stocked pantry with food, snacks and drinks when in the office.

Seniority level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

Part‑time

Job function

IT Services and IT Consulting