A Major UK Global Bank (London)
Sourcing a Senior Platform Engineer to Accelerate Azure Delivery and Strengthen Platform Resilience
The Challenge
The engineering function at a major UK global bank needed a Senior Platform Engineer to strengthen its Azure platform as adoption scaled across the organisation. The remit was broad: automation, networking, multi-region reliability, and building self-service capability for development teams. It was a role that required both technical depth and the judgment to operate in a regulated, complex environment.
Azure engineers at this level are scarce. The bank had already tried twice. Both times they lost candidates at offer stage, and the reasons were not purely about money. Delivery milestones started to slip. The platform team was struggling to keep pace with demand from security, resilience, and environment requests, and the gap left by the vacancy was becoming harder to absorb.
The hiring manager wanted a recruitment partner who understood what senior engineers actually look for in a role, not just someone who could match keywords on a CV.
The Solution
Xist4 ran a retained search focused on technical capability, practical delivery experience, and the specific dynamics that had caused two previous offers to fall apart.
- Ran a detailed briefing to define the full technical scope: Azure networking, multi-region design, resiliency patterns, Terraform, DevOps pipelines, and cross-team collaboration.
- Addressed the offer-stage risk directly, building consistent candidate communication into the process from the start to prevent the silence and misalignment that had cost the bank twice before.
- Provided market insight on talent availability, hybrid working expectations, and where the brief needed sharpening to be competitive.
- Targeted engineers with hands-on experience across Azure App Services, Containers, APIM, Firewall, Front Door, Service Bus, and regulated-cloud governance, people who had worked at scale, not just studied it.
- Positioned the role around what senior engineers care about: real ownership, influence over platform patterns, and visible impact across the organisation.
- Used scenario-based assessments to test engineering judgment rather than surface knowledge.
- Advised on interview pacing and offer structure to keep candidates engaged through a process that had previously moved too slowly.
The Result
Within six weeks, Xist4 produced a shortlist of engineers with genuine Azure-scale experience. The hired candidate brought strong infrastructure-as-code discipline, hands-on multi-region delivery, and the ability to work effectively across security and operations teams.
At the three-month follow-up, the hiring manager reported faster deployment cycles, clearer platform patterns, and meaningfully better support for engineering squads. The new hire had reduced bottlenecks and helped stabilise key Azure services. Two failed searches and a six-week vacancy gap made that outcome more than just a good hire. It was a relief.