Senior Platform Engineer (Bare Metal)

This role is all about building and scaling the physical foundation of Form3's infrastructure - true bare metal. It's a hands-on engineering position for someone who thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.

As a Platform Engineer, you'll take ownership of managing and scaling high-performance bare metal systems. You'll work deeply with server hardware, oversee firmware updates, and build automation around server provisioning. The focus is on developing and maintaining resilient, scalable distributed systems that support our broader platform - ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and operability.

Projects you'll be involved with:

• Streamlining our approach to data centre maintenance to make it as low effort as possible
• Scaling out the UK data centres to meet future customer demand
• Improving performance of our infrastructure
• Improving the automation of infrastructure provisioning, The Platform Infrastructure Team is responsible for building and operating the infrastructure that supports our on-premise Kubernetes clusters and manages our UK & US data centres. We also oversee cloud infrastructure across GCP, AWS, and Azure, running managed Kubernetes clusters that power our Cloud payments platform.

Our infrastructure underpins the FPS gateway-the largest payment gateway by volume we operate-making our work central to Form3's ability to scale and meet growing customer demands. We manage over 60 hypervisors and hundreds of VMs across multiple environments, combining robust Infrastructure as Code with hands-on operational expertise.

We're a self-sufficient, distributed team empowered to make our own decisions. As part of the wider Platform Engineering organisation, we collaborate closely with adjacent teams to ensure secure and highly available connectivity across our infrastructure and with our customers.

Team responsibilities:

• Managing, operating, and ensuring the reliability of hypervisors (bare metal machines) for VM provisioning and management
• Deployment, maintenance, and updates of software tools critical to bare metal and VM provisioning such as Digital Rebar and Apache CloudStack
• Continuous improvements in our data centre maintenance process, collaborating in cross-team efforts to ensure robust and efficient operations
• Being on-call to ensure the seamless performance and uptime of the infrastructure & services, responding promptly to any issues or incidents

• Solid grounding in system installation, including operating system installations, building system images, and automated server provisioning
• Experience in Infrastructure as Code patterns and practices (Terraform and Ansible are a plus)
• Familiarity with hardware lifecycle, including firmware patching, BIOS configuration, and component troubleshooting
• Knowledge of networking, including Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols, VLANs, and link aggregation
• Strong understanding of virtualization technologies like KVM and QEMU and their interaction with underlying hardware
• Understanding of Kubernetes and its intricacies when run on bare metal infrastructure
• Experience running Kubernetes in cloud environments is a real plus
• A background in Software Engineering and solid programming experience is beneficial but not essential (preferably Go but we're flexible on this)
• Enthusiasm towards ensuring a high degree of service reliability, always putting the stability & safety of our products at the forefront

TECH STACK ️

RackN Digital Rebar, Apache CloudStack, KVM, QEMU, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Packer, EKS, AKS, GKE

We are an award-winning cloud-native payment technology provider for financially regulated institutions. Launched in 2016, we've doubled in size year on year as we continue to redefine what a truly instant payment experience means.

We celebrate diversity, promote entrepreneurialism and are committed to giving everyone a say in shaping our business. Here you will grow as a person and accomplish incredible things. A career at Form3 is empowering, inspiring and fun. Join us and help shape the future of payments.