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.

Our customers – including global financial institutions, corporations and technology companies – rely on our Labyrinth Screening product to monitor millions of client records, counterparties and prospects for sanctions, AML/CTF and other risks against billions of data points in near-real time. The platform engineering team provides the resilient infrastructure, tooling, and operational excellence that make this possible.

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.

This role is ideal for a manager who thrives on improving processes, building reliable systems, and developing teams that take pride in operational excellence.

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. You’ll 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.

Why join us?

• Purpose-Driven Work: Build and operate the platforms that power technology combating financial crime worldwide.

• Structured Career Growth: We take career development seriously—with regular reviews, progression frameworks, and the support you need to succeed.

• High Standards, Real Autonomy: You’ll have the freedom to shape your team’s ways of working, supported by a leadership team that values outcomes over process.

• Collaborative Culture: Join a high-trust, low-ego environment where decisions are made with integrity, not politics.

Ideal for:

This role is a great fit for someone who is:

• 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

What we’re looking for:

• 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. Our production workloads are currently hosted in public cloud (AWS) and our dev/test workloads are self-orchestrated using clustered Proxmox as a private cloud. Our analytics workloads are distributed on bare metal using Spark, HBASE and HDFS. We make extensive use of terraform and ansible for IaC, our CI/CD uses GitHub Actions, our observability is provided via Datadog and we increasingly orchestrate our workloads using K8’s.
• Skilled in agile delivery, incident management, and balancing operational priorities with longer term company objectives.

• Thought leadership such that you can engage confidently with engineers on design decisions, architecture, and trade-offs.

Benefits

Why we think you’ll enjoy it here:

• 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 well-stocked pantries with food, snacks and drinks when in the office