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

ABOUT US Pliant is a modular B2B payments platform that combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, FX, and spend management in one system — adapting to existing setups rather than requiring customers to replace them. Businesses across industries such as travel, e-commerce, and insurance use Pliant to manage complex payment workflows with cards, backed by credit lines Pliant underwrites itself. Fintechs and software platforms embed Pliant's payment infrastructure into their own products, from API-based Cards-as-a-Service to fully white-label solutions. Banks use Pliant's Card & Spend OS, the customer-facing interface, on their own infrastructure to run card programs Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant serves 5,000+ businesses and 40+ partners across Europe and the United States. A principal member of Visa and Mastercard, Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries — under its own European e-money license and with licensed partners in the UK and US. Learn more at www.getpliant.com http://www.getpliant.com ABOUT THE ROLE 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. WHAT YOU'LL DO - 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. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 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 YEAR 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. STACK Terraform, Spacelift, AWS (including a dedicated PCI-scoped account), Datadog. We're mid