Engineering Manager - Platform Core *EU/UK remote* (m/f/d)

Pliant builds corporate payment infrastructure, and the Platform team's job is to give the rest of engineering a cloud platform they can build on without having to think about it. This is the first Engineering Manager role for Platform Core, a team of four engineers already running Pliant's core Terraform, multi-account AWS, and IAM and networking foundations. You'll take over the people side while owning the roadmap for where the platform goes next, treating internal engineering teams as the customers of what you build.

• Own the roadmap for Platform Core's Terraform infrastructure, multi-account AWS setup, and IAM/networking foundations.
• Run Platform Core as an internal product, not a cost center: ensuring Spacelift guardrails, sensitive-resource checks, and mandatory tagging policies genuinely help other teams rather than get in their way.
• Collaborate closely with Security Engineering to ensure access controls and compliance requirements are built into the platform from the ground up, not bolted on after the fact.
• Steer the ongoing compute migration from ECS/Fargate to Kubernetes through to completion.
• Manage and grow the team through 1:1s, hiring, and performance development.
• Coordinate with the future SRE team and other platform functions as the team scales from a single team into several.

• 7–10 years in software or infrastructure engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers directly.
• Hands-on depth with Terraform, multi-account AWS, and container or serverless compute. You've run these systems in production, at scale.
• Experience running infrastructure as an internal platform that other teams build on and depend on daily, with a high bar for incident and change management that requires.
• A demonstrated track record of hiring and developing engineers, with specific examples of people you levelled or promoted.
• Datadog or equivalent observability experience at scale.
• Clear, confident communication for a technical, cross-team audience.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as Copilot, Claude Code, or Cursor, and the same rigour reviewing AI-generated PRs as any other.

The first few months are focused on meeting the existing team and understanding what's already running before changing anything, including getting a real read on where the ECS-to-Kubernetes migration actually stands. By mid-year, you'll have a roadmap the team believes in, and the Spacelift guardrails will reflect decisions that have been properly reviewed rather than defaults nobody has revisited. By year one, the compute migration has moved meaningfully forward, and Platform Core is a team other functions actively seek out for help rather than simply depend on.