Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Thought Machine
Cloud native banking platform
Open for applications
Cloud native banking platform
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Thought Machine's mission is to build the new foundations for banking. They want to cure one of the banking industry's primary problems: its reliance on outdated IT infrastructure. Nearly every bank is still stuck on a legacy IT platform.
Role
Who you are
- You have a track record of delivering high-impact projects with focus on long-term scalability, ensuring that human intervention scales sub-linearly with usage growth
- You possess an up-to-date understanding of design patterns relevant to hosting and networking architectures
- You proactively champion product development, driven by a desire to build truly exceptional products, not just solve immediate challenges
- You’re a high-agency individual who can independently drive projects to completion by effectively scaling your individual output with the appropriate delegation of work to team members
- You have a strong background working in either Python, Golang or Java, having used one of these programming languages to execute a significantly sized project or initiative
- You have experience working with Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems
- You have experience with automation/configuration management, e.g. Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible
- You have expertise in one or more of the following areas: Database Administration, Networking, Observability Tools (such as Prometheus, Jaeger) or automation infrastructure
- You have extensive experience working with either GCP or AWS
- You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description
What the job involves
- Thought Machine’s Site Reliability Engineers are the guardians of mission-critical systems for the world's most influential financial institutions
- As a member of our elite, globally distributed team, you'll be entrusted with running and maintaining the robust production infrastructure that powers our customers' cutting-edge Core Banking and Payments platforms
- This is an opportunity to make a tangible impact on the global financial landscape while collaborating with brilliant minds to solve complex engineering challenges
- This role will be part of the Site Reliability Engineering team at Thought Machine HQ in London, tackling the challenges of automating complex fleet management operations
- Mentoring team members, Promoting communities of best practice within engineering as well as designing operational processes that provide effective interfaces between Thought Machine and our SaaS customers
- The SRE team is deeply involved in tackling the technical challenges of executing Thought Machine’s growth ambitions - expect to be working with senior stakeholders in the organisation and with our customers, and working on programmes and initiatives that are critical to the success of the company
- Supporting the product engineering teams in building highly fault-tolerant, scalable applications by participating in design discussions, engaging in RFCs and code reviews
- Executing various department strategies - contributing to the design and scoping work for team members around disaster recovery, backup, redundancy and capacity planning activities
- Being part of a global on-call rotation responsible for identifying and fixing bottlenecks in SaaS customer environments
- Regular maintenance of production systems that host Vault products
- Driving the evolution of our SaaS products by defining and designing features that foster exceptional reliability and an unparalleled user experience
- Implementing and regularly testing DR strategies to ensure the highest level of resilience and fault tolerance of the platform
- Maintain and promote high-quality written documentation of assets, processes and runbooks that are used by the team in their day-to-day operations,
- Working with your Manager in growing team members in their technical skills as well as their understanding of Vault Products
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Most traditional banks are stuck on legacy technology. The world's biggest banks today have been around for hundreds of years and their systems reflect this. Their tech systems were built in the mid-20th century and changes/improvements have been layered on top since then.
This infrastructure is creaking in a lot of these institutions, so they need a radical overhaul if they're going to compete with challenger banks like Monzo, N26 and Starling, that have built their banks on modern technology from the ground up.
Thought Machine's customers are primarily in Europe and Asia, and include legacy outfits like Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, and Sweden’s SEB, but they are also working with challenger banks like Atom Bank. Traditional banks will need to innovate to hold on to their market share, and will need the latest technology to do it, providing a big opportunity for Thought Machine.
The company has raised more than $500m in funding and are now valued at $2.7bn, which is being used to support the transformation of the retail banking market with cloud native technology, solving bank reliance on legacy IT. Thought Machine were named AltFi's B2B Fintech of the Year, placed in the FinTech50, and in the IDC list of top 100 Fintechs.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Oct 2025
$60.2m
LATE VC
May 2022
$160m
SERIES D
Total funding: $620.2m
Company benefits
- Life Insurance- 3 times annual salary
- Competitive Maternity and Paternity leave
- Shared parental leave
- Cycle to work scheme
- Pension (match up to 5%)
- 25 days holiday (excl. bank holidays) + 2 days Charity Leave
Company HQ
Bloomsbury, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Paul Taylor
(CEO)Founder of Phonetic Arts (speech technology in gaming) until it was acquired by Google 4 years later. Then worked for Google as a Technical Lead for 3 years
People progressing
Joined as Back End Software Engineer and became a Tech Lead Manager after 1 year 4 months and is now an Engineering Director.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Thought Machine
Natalie Brock (Chief of Staff - People)
- Diversity is an integral part of life at Thought Machine. We want to create a work environment where employees enjoy showing up to work authentically as their best self.
- We celebrate our differences with culture events and internal community networks such as the women’s group, OUT our LGBTQ+ group and Belong, which celebrates different ethnicities
- In terms of nationality, Thought Machine has 450 staff and over 45 different nationalities across three offices.
- Although we are above the UK’s average of women in fintech, we have got work to do.
- To help us achieve greater parity we have introduced a number of measures and initiatives, including coaching and training.
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