Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Are you passionate about development?

The Touch team is developing a next generation investment platform. We want to use technology to improve the way consumers access financial advice and manage their investments.

The majority of existing platforms are still reliant on software and processes that aren’t capable of supporting today’s technology, so we started from scratch, developing a modern platform that is as efficient as possible.

We're building a mobile first investment app that lets advisers manage their clients' investments entirely through their Smartphone.

We're seeking passionate engineers to join the team.

If you're ready to take your career to the next level, apply now!

What you'll do:

• Design, manage and extend Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Monitor environments for performance, errors and security, catching issues before customers even notice. Focus on low levels of toil by improving tooling and processes.
• Infrastructure hardening including resolutions from pen tests, audit and other third-party testing of our estate.
• Make changes to Go, Typescript or Flutter code to support infrastructure changes.
• Work as part of a distributed team made up of self-motivated and collaborative individuals. Much of our communication is remote and async so good communication skills are key.
• Always look for ways we can improve our product, processes and practices. We don’t like friction and waste.
• Automated testing, continuous integration and continuous deployment. We are huge proponents of automation.
• Work outside of your specialism when needed. While all our team members have a specialism, we don’t let that restrain us. Our engineers jump in to help get things done even in technologies out of their core competency.

What you'll have:

• Excellent programming and problem solving skills
• Understanding of relevant software design patterns and paradigms, such as microservices, containers/orchestration or event-driven architecture
• Experience in creating performant, scalable, secure and well tested infrastructure.
• You take ownership of tasks and problems, clearing roadblocks and pulling in other people to help when needed.
• Experience working with Investment or Pensions platforms would be an advantage

Our tools and technologies:

The below are all things that we are either currently using or have found to be a useful foundation when joining our team. Prior knowledge of them is not essential but would be beneficial to the role:

• CI/CD pipelines (we use GitLab)
• Cloud infrastructure (we use Google Cloud Platform)
• Containers (building, operations, security, and orchestration; we use Kubernetes)
• Go (we can offer training for experienced engineers who haven’t used Go before)
• Experience of penetration testing and audit
• Infrastructure as Code (we use Terraform and Terragrunt)
• Networking (layer 4 and 7 load balancing, DNS, mTLS)
• Observability systems (we're particularly interested in Prometheus, Grafana and
• OpenTelemetry)
• PKI (particularly Vault)
• Scripting (we predominantly use Bash and Go)
• PostgreSQL

About Touch by AJ Bell:

Touch are developing a next generation investment platform. We want to use technology to improve the way consumers access financial advice and manage their investments. The majority of existing platforms are still reliant on software and processes that aren’t capable of supporting today’s technology, so we started from scratch, developing a modern platform that is as efficient as possible.

We're building a mobile first investment app that lets advisers manage their clients' investments entirely through their smartphone.

We originally founded the company (then Adalpha Ltd) in 2018, before being acquired in 2021 by AJ Bell.

AJ Bell is one of the fastest-growing investment platform businesses in the UK offering an award-winning range of solutions that caters for everyone, from professional financial advisers, to DIY investors with little to no experience. We have over 542,000 customers using our award-winning platform propositions to manage assets totalling more than £86.5 billion. Our customers trust us with their investments, and by continuously striving to make investing easier, we aim to help even more people take control of their financial futures.

Having listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange in December 2018, AJ Bell is now a FTSE 250 company.

Headquartered in Manchester with offices in central London and Bristol, we now have over 1,450 employees and have been named one of the UK's 'Best 100 Companies to Work For’ for six consecutive years.

At AJ Bell you can expect a friendly working environment with a strong sense of teamwork, we have a great sense of pride in what we do, and this is reflected in our guiding principles.

Our perks and benefits:

• Starting holiday entitlement of 25 days, increasing up to 31 days with length of service
• Holiday buy and sell scheme
• A choice of pension schemes with matched contributions up to 6%
• Discretionary bonus scheme
• Annual free share awards scheme
• Buy As You Earn (BAYE) Scheme
• Health Cash Plan 
• Discounted private healthcare scheme and dental plan
• Free gym membership
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Bike loan scheme
• Sick pay+ pledge
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave
• Loans for travel season tickets
• Death in service scheme
• Dedicated time for proof-of-concepts and assessing new tech
• Support to attend conferences, events, and meet-ups
• Paid time off for volunteer work
• Charitable giving opportunities through salary sacrifice
• Calendar of social events, including monthly payday drinks, annual Christmas party, summer party and much more
• Personal development programmes built around you and your career goals, including access to personal skills workshops
• Ongoing technical training
• Professional qualification support
• Talent management programmes
• Peer recognition scheme, with rewards including restaurant and shopping vouchers or time off
• Monthly leadership breakfasts and lunches
• Casual dress code
• Access to a range of benefits from our sponsorship deals

Hybrid working:

At AJ Bell, our people are the heart of our culture. We believe in building strong connections by working together. That's why we offer a hybrid working model, where you’ll spend a minimum of 50% of your working time per month in the office. For new team members, an initial period will be full-time in the office to help you immerse yourself in our business and build valuable relationships with your colleagues.

AJ Bell is committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and all employees are empowered to bring their whole self to work.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, pregnancy, religion, physical and mental disability, marital status and any other characteristics protected by the Equality Act 2010. All decisions to hire are based on qualifications, merit and business need.

If you like the sound of the above, or just want to know more about the company and the role, we'd love to speak to you.