Team Lead - Platform Engineering

WHO WE ARE

NEXT Ventures is where ambition takes shape and momentum becomes movement. As a global platform revolutionising access to performance-based capital, we empower the world's most driven individuals to rise. Through our flagship brand, FundedNext, we empower dreamers to become doers, and potential to turn into performance. With 500+ driven minds across five countries, we power a global rhythm — 220,000+ daily users from 170+ nations, each chasing greatness in their own way.

YOUR ROLE IN OUR MISSION

As the Platform Engineering Lead at FundedNext, you own the infrastructure that a global trading platform runs on — and the squad that keeps it fast, reliable, and secure. You set the technical direction for scalability, reliability, and architecture. You translate business growth into engineering strategy, ensure product squads are never blocked by infrastructure, and build the culture and systems that make the platform perform at scale.

This isn't a management role that drifted from engineering. You're still deep in the work — profiling, architecting, and shipping alongside your squad — while also running sprint cadences, owning the platform roadmap, and holding the reliability bar for the entire platform. When the system slows down or falls over, you're the person who makes sure it never happens the same way twice.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE AN IMPACT

Scalability & Performance Engineering

• Own the scalability posture of the entire FundedNext platform — proactively identify bottlenecks, design horizontal and vertical scaling strategies, and ensure the infrastructure can handle 2–5x traffic growth without degradation.

• Lead database sharding, partitioning, and replication strategy across MySQL/PostgreSQL — designing data distribution approaches that maintain query performance as data volume grows from millions to billions of rows.

• Institutionalise query optimisation cycles across all services — analyse execution plans, implement indexing strategies, and establish performance monitoring baselines that prevent regressions.

• Architect data archiving solutions — designing policies and pipelines for moving historical trade logs, transaction records, and audit trails to cold storage without impacting production query performance or compliance requirements.

• Champion performance engineering culture across all squads — establish performance budgets, introduce load testing into the delivery pipeline, and provide tooling that makes it easy for product squads to detect and fix performance issues early.

Reliability, DR & Security

• Own Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) readiness — design, implement, and regularly drill failover procedures to achieve minimal RTO and RPO across all critical services.

• Drive system reliability to 99.9% uptime — implementing health checks, circuit breakers, graceful degradation patterns, and automated recovery mechanisms.

• Own the resolution of security findings from the Cyber Security Squad — receive vulnerability reports, audit findings, and penetration test results, then prioritise, remediate, and verify fixes across infrastructure and application layers.

• Design and implement centralised log management and unified observability — ensuring MTTD under 15 minutes and MTTR under 60 minutes through proper alerting, dashboarding, and runbook documentation.

• Establish deployment discipline across squads — CI/CD pipeline reliability, rollback procedures, canary deployments, and DORA metrics tracking to ensure each squad deploys at least once per week safely.

Infrastructure & Architecture

• Architect and manage the container orchestration layer (Docker, Kubernetes, or ECS) — ensuring consistent, reproducible environments across development, staging, and production.

• Own the cloud infrastructure on AWS — VPC design, compute scaling (EC2, ECS, Lambda), managed database services (RDS, ElastiCache), storage (S3), CDN configuration, and cost optimisation.

• Design and scale the event-driven architecture layer — message queue infrastructure (RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) for asynchronous processing, event sourcing, and inter-service communication across the microservices ecosystem.

• Drive the microservices strategy — service decomposition, API gateway management, distributed tracing, service discovery, and ensuring the platform doesn't become a distributed monolith.

Squad Leadership & Engineering Culture

• Lead the Platform Engineering Squad — own sprint planning, technical direction, delivery cadence, and cross-squad coordination to ensure platform work never blocks product delivery.

• Manage stakeholder relationships across product squads, cybersecurity, and business leadership — prioritising platform work based on highest impact to overall engineering velocity and system reliability.

• Establish architecture decision records (ADRs), infrastructure-as-code practices, and technical documentation standards that make the platform self-documenting and maintainable.

• Mentor and grow platform engineers — fostering a performance-obsessed engineering culture where everyone proactively looks for ways to make the system faster, more reliable, and more scalable.

• Contribute to customer-facing FundedNext product engineering when needed — stepping in when product squads face architectural challenges, performance bottlenecks, or need infrastructure-aware feature implementations.

WHAT YOU BRING

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering at scale.

• At least 2 years in a technical leadership or squad lead role — setting technical direction, running delivery cadences, and mentoring engineers.

• Expert-level PHP and Laravel proficiency — able to optimise for high throughput, diagnose framework-level performance bottlenecks, and design application-level caching strategies.

• Strong proficiency in Node.js for high-performance backend services and Next.js for internal tooling — comfortable contributing across the full stack when needed.

• Deep expertise in database architecture and optimisation — sharding, replication topologies, partitioning, query optimisation, indexing strategies, and data archiving pipelines (MySQL and/or PostgreSQL at scale).

• Strong hands-on experience with Docker and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, or equivalent) in production environments.

• Deep AWS experience — VPC architecture, compute (EC2, ECS, Lambda), databases (RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache/Redis), storage (S3), networking (ALB, CloudFront, Route 53), and cost management. Must be able to design and manage production-grade AWS infrastructure.

• Hands-on experience with message queue systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) for event-driven architecture and inter-service communication.

• Experience designing and implementing microservices architectures — service decomposition, API design, distributed tracing, service discovery, and managing the complexity of distributed systems.

• Proven track record in BC/DR planning — designing failover architectures, running disaster recovery drills, and achieving measurable RTO/RPO targets.

• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and deployment automation — GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar; canary deployments, rollback strategies, and DORA metrics tracking.

• Experience with monitoring and observability stacks — Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Datadog, or equivalent; able to design alerting strategies achieving MTTD under 15 minutes.

• Familiarity with security remediation workflows — receiving findings from security teams, prioritising by severity, implementing fixes, and verifying through retesting.

• A performance-obsessed engineering mindset — someone who instinctively profiles, benchmarks, and optimises, and gets genuine satisfaction from making systems faster and more reliable.

AI-Native Engineering (Mandatory)

This one is non-negotiable. You must demonstrate active, daily use of modern AI agentic workflows — well beyond basic ChatGPT prompts or Copilot autocomplete. We expect fluency with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or similar), project-level AI configuration (CLAUDE.md, rules files), agentic task delegation, and AI-driven code review. The bar is 5–10x productivity through AI-augmented development. Candidates who are not AI-native in their engineering workflow will not advance.

YOUR X-FACTOR

• You've run real DR drills with measurable RTO/RPO outcomes — not just designed the architecture on paper.

• Demonstrable cloud cost-optimisation wins where you cut spend without sacrificing reliability or performance.

• Background building or operating high-throughput systems in fintech, prop trading, brokerage, or another transaction-heavy domain.

• Experience leading a platform or SRE squad — delivery ownership, not just technical contribution.

• Open-source contributions to infrastructure, tooling, or developer-experience projects that reflect how you think.

• A track record of turning incidents into permanent architectural improvements — postmortems that change the system, not just the runbook.

YOUR JOURNEY AFTER APPLYING

• 30-minute HR session with the Talent Acquisition team.

• 60-minute technical session with Engineering leadership (hiring manager).

• Technical assessment — a hands-on system design and infrastructure exercise.

• Final session with the VP Engineering.

WHY JOIN NEXT

At NEXT Ventures, performance is more than numbers — it's the pulse that drives everything we build. As the Platform Engineering Lead, you're not supporting the business — you're one of the people who decides how fast it can grow. The infrastructure you architect and the squad you lead directly shape what 220,000+ daily users from 170+ nations experience every time they trade.

Join us to build at a scale that matters, lead a team that's genuinely performance-obsessed, and write the next chapter of what a global fintech platform can do.