You’re Scaling. Your Infrastructure Isn’t.

In FinTech, speed is survival. Scaling product. Scaling users. Scaling revenue. But what about scaling infrastructure? For too many high-growth FinTech firms in New York, London and Belfast, infrastructure support is lagging dangerously behind. And that gap isn’t just technical, it’s a hiring problem with commercial consequences.

This blog explores why infrastructure support recruitment is now a critical priority for FinTech firms, and what your business needs to do to attract the right talent before performance, resilience, or reputation suffer.

Why Infrastructure Support Is Business-Critical for FinTech Firms

Infrastructure support has traditionally lived in the shadows, underappreciated, underfunded, and too often, under-resourced. But in today’s FinTech environment, where downtime costs clients, reputational damage spreads fast, and platforms operate 24/7, infrastructure support is now mission-critical.

The firms that are thriving in 2025 are the ones that treat infrastructure support as a strategic capability, not just a cost centre. That means investing in people who can do more than react to outages, they prevent them, optimise systems, and scale operations alongside your product.

The FinTech Infrastructure Bottleneck: What Scaling Really Looks Like

Most FinTechs we work with share a similar growth trajectory:

• Product-Market Fit →
• Funding →
• Customer Growth →
• Platform Strain →
• Reactive Hiring

It’s common to see incredible investment in product and engineering teams, while infrastructure support grows at a fraction of the pace. The result? Overloaded systems, stressed teams, and a growing backlog of tickets and performance issues.

If your business has scaled headcount, revenue, or customers this year, but your infrastructure team still looks like it did two years ago, you’re likely heading toward operational risk.

What Happens When You Under-Hire Infrastructure Support Talent

Here’s what underinvestment in infrastructure support looks like on the ground:

• Site reliability engineers on 24/7 calls without backup
• Slow incident response times and rising MTTR
• Increasing dependency on a few “firefighting” individuals
• Engineers distracted from long-term projects to cover basic support
• System migrations delayed due to lack of support bandwidth
• Increased risk during audits, vendor reviews, or client onboarding

All of this leads to one thing: friction. Friction between teams. Friction in the customer experience. Friction in your ability to grow.

The Skills Gap in Infrastructure Support Recruitment

The talent market for infrastructure support in FinTech is tightening. The shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, rising security demands, and expectations around automation mean the skills required have evolved quickly.

In 2025, the most in-demand Infrastructure Support talent has:

• Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)
• Proficiency in monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
• Automation and scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell)
• Strong stakeholder communication skills across engineering, compliance, and product

These professionals are not easy to find, and harder still to retain. They want to work where infrastructure is prioritised, respected, and built into long-term strategy.

Common Mistakes FinTechs Make When Hiring Infrastructure Support

Despite best intentions, many FinTech firms make critical hiring errors when scaling infrastructure support:

• Hiring too late: Waiting until something breaks before building out the team
• Too much focus on tools: Prioritising candidates who know specific tech stacks over those with problem-solving experience
• No career path: Failing to show how infra talent can grow internally
• Neglecting soft skills: Overlooking communication, collaboration, and ownership mindset
• One-size-fits-all hiring: Using engineering hiring processes for infrastructure roles, which require different priorities

Avoiding these mistakes can dramatically improve your time-to-hire and team performance.

• How to Interview for Infrastructure Support Roles in FinTech
• Interviewing infra support professionals isn’t about checking off a technical wishlist,  it’s about identifying resilience, ownership, and long-term fit.
• We recommend clients assess candidates on:
• Real-world troubleshooting scenarios (e.g., a failed deployment, a mystery outage)
• Cross-functional collaboration (how they engage with engineers, compliance, support)
• Process improvement experience (not just fixing issues, but improving the systems)
• Ability to prioritise and triage under pressure
• Cultural alignment with your organisation’s pace, tools, and values
• Structured interviews focused on behaviour, not just tech, lead to more successful hires.

The Cost of Delaying Infrastructure Hires in FinTech

Delaying infrastructure support recruitment is often rationalised as a short-term cost-saving measure. But in FinTech, where seconds matter and user experience is everything, the cost of delay is far greater than the cost of hiring.

Here’s what delaying infrastructure hires really costs:

• Increased platform downtime, which impacts trust and churn
• Reduced developer productivity as engineers are pulled into support
• Slower time-to-market for new features due to technical bottlenecks
• Increased exposure to compliance risk due to poor system monitoring
• Burnout among your current support team, leading to turnover

These aren't just IT issues,  they're growth issues, reputational issues, and ultimately, revenue issues. In a sector built on trust, stability, and seamless service, infrastructure hiring delays are too costly to ignore.

Questions Every FinTech Leader Should Ask About Their Infra Team

If you're not sure whether it's time to invest in infrastructure support hiring, start with these questions:

• Do we have 24/7 coverage, or are we relying on goodwill and overtime?
• Are platform issues getting resolved quickly, or simply being escalated repeatedly?
• Is our infrastructure team proactive or reactive?
• Have we seen an increase in incidents over the last six months?
• Is our current team capacity sufficient for our growth forecast?
• Are we dependent on one or two individuals for critical infrastructure knowledge?

If you answered “no” or “I’m not sure” to any of the above, it’s time to review your hiring strategy before your next growth push breaks the system.

Permanent vs. Contract Infrastructure Support Hiring: What Works Best?

If you’re facing immediate gaps, contract infrastructure support professionals can offer speed and flexibility. This is especially useful during system migrations, platform re-architectures, or regulatory upgrades.

But for long-term resilience, you’ll need a core permanent team who understands your systems deeply, embeds within your culture, and scales with you. Many of our clients build hybrid teams,  using contractors to plug short-term gaps while hiring permanent staff to anchor the infrastructure function.

The key is not choosing one or the other, it’s having a hiring strategy that aligns with your business roadmap.

Infrastructure Support Recruitment in New York, London, and Belfast

At Harrington Starr, we see location-specific challenges across our key markets:

• New York: High competition from both FinTech and traditional finance, with a premium on speed of hire and salary expectations
• London: Talent is abundant, but demand is surging across cloud transformation, DevOps, and platform stability roles
• Belfast: A growing FinTech hub, offering access to high-quality infrastructure support professionals with competitive salary expectations

Each location has its own supply/demand curve. The best hiring strategies account for local talent availability while maintaining a consistent standard across global teams.

Why FinTech Firms Choose Harrington Starr for Infrastructure Support Recruitment

When it comes to Infrastructure Support hiring, most FinTech firms aren’t just looking for CVs, they’re looking for confidence. Confidence that the person joining their team has the experience, mindset, and resilience to keep their systems online and scaling.

That’s where Harrington Starr comes in.

We’re a global FinTech recruitment business with offices in New York, London, and Belfast, specialising in hard-to-hire, business-critical roles. With over a decade of experience in the sector, we understand the pressures FinTechs face when it comes to platform reliability, user experience, and regulatory compliance, and how Infrastructure Support teams underpin all of it.

Whether you need a permanent Site Reliability Engineer to drive platform improvement, a contract Infrastructure Analyst to handle a migration, or a full Infrastructure Support function built from the ground up, we have the network, expertise, and speed to deliver.

Our consultants work as trusted partners, not transactional recruiters. We invest in understanding your technical environment, hiring challenges, and growth plans, so we can advise you on the right mix of skills, team structure, and market expectations.

What sets us apart?

• Access to a pre-qualified talent pool across DevOps, SRE, and Infrastructure
• Experience placing both contract and permanent professionals
• Insight into salary benchmarking, onboarding, and retention best practices
• A reputation for delivery in high-pressure, high-growth environments

Infrastructure Support is no longer a back-office function. It’s a frontline necessity. Harrington Starr helps you hire accordingly and competitively.

How to Attract the Best Infrastructure Support Professionals in FinTech

Top infrastructure support candidates aren’t just looking for compensation. They’re looking for:

• Clear career progression and development
• Investment in tooling and automation
• A seat at the table in engineering decisions
• A collaborative team environment
• A roadmap that includes them, not just reacts to them

Your employer brand matters. If infrastructure support feels like an afterthought in your hiring message, the best talent will move on, fast.

Building a Scalable Infrastructure Support Function for Your Business

If you’re serious about scale, your infrastructure function must scale with you. That means getting ahead of the hiring curve, not behind it. Start with a review of:

• Current team capacity and burnout levels
• Incident response metrics
• Planned product or user growth
• Upcoming platform migrations or compliance deadlines

Then build a hiring plan that balances permanent and contract support. Invest in your infrastructure team like you invest in product, because they’re both essential to sustainable growth.

Ready to Strengthen Your Infrastructure Support Team?

Harrington Starr is a FinTech recruitment specialist with proven experience in building high-performing Infrastructure Support teams across New York, London, and Belfast. We work with FinTech businesses at every stage of growth, from early-stage scale-ups to established global platforms, helping them secure contract and permanent talent that delivers operational resilience and platform stability.

Whether you’re upgrading legacy systems, migrating to the cloud, or scaling to meet user demand, we can connect you with the Infrastructure Support professionals who will keep your business running and growing.

Speak to our team today about your hiring goals. We’ll help you build a future-proof Infrastructure Support function that grows as fast as your ambitions.