Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer 

Location: London / Hybrid – minimum 2 days per week in the London office
Contract: Fixed-Term Contract / Interim / Freelance
Duration: Long-term programme
Salary: Competitive, depending on experience

The Opportunity

DevOps / Platform Engineer — Core TeamThe Team
As a DevOps / Platform Engineer in the Core Team, you'll be part of our Group Technology Platforms business area, working out of our London office. The Core Team supports software development across the organisation by developing the patterns, processes and tooling that make up our internal development platform — the Common Platform. We do this by taking the best of open source, cloud native and SaaS tooling, and packaging it into highly automated, easy-to-deploy template architectures and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) patterns.
As owner of the Common Platform tooling, the Core Team is responsible to the platform's consumers for bug and issue resolution and feature requests. You'll also work alongside our Embedded Platform Engineers, as part of the wider Common Platform team, to ensure best practice, DevOps capabilities and tooling are shared across our software development teams. This means effectively communicating upcoming platform changes to downstream teams through presentations, training workshops and coaching sessions.

The Role

• Designing and contributing to the IaC modules that make up the Common Platform, used to:
  • Deploy and manage our Kubernetes clusters
  • Deploy and manage our standard CI/CD pipelines and workflows
  • Deploy and manage our standard observability tooling
  • Deploy cloud resources as required for application services and workloads
• Working within the Core Team to prioritise work for upgrades and business delivery, and supporting engineers with deployment and production issues
• Ensuring the smooth rollout of new platform features and functionality by consulting with our Embedded Platform Engineers and Software Engineers, delivering training and coaching
• Reviewing and approving pull requests from engineers across the organisation to support deployment of new infrastructure, permission changes and access
• Maintaining and supporting infrastructure for the Core Platform Team, including our testing environments
• Managing upgrades of Kubernetes deployments in AWS
• Defining and designing infrastructure for the future — whether for a new application or the re-design of an existing one
• Sharing best practice within the Common Platform team and contributing back ideas, improvements and designs

Skills You'll Need (Minimum Criteria)

• Knowledge and proven experience of secure cloud practices, and building highly performant, scalable cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS)
• Knowledge and proven experience of Infrastructure as Code technologies (ideally Terraform), and using/implementing version control strategies with these technologies
• Knowledge and proven experience of containerisation and deploying container workloads, ideally on Kubernetes
• Knowledge and proven experience with Continuous Delivery / Continuous Integration patterns and platforms (e.g. Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Knowledge and proven experience with monitoring and alerting tools
• Knowledge and proven experience responding to production incidents to diagnose and resolve infrastructure-related issues

Other Things We're Looking For (Key Criteria)

• Knowledge and proven experience in cloud cost optimisation, balanced with resilient infrastructure needs
• In-depth knowledge of Linux (CentOS, Amazon Linux 2)
• Knowledge and experience working within an Agile delivery methodology
• Strong communication skills and the ability to give and receive constructive feedback, particularly through design and code collaboration (e.g. PR reviews)
• A genuine interest in working within a team structure and building relationships across multiple teams (Embedded and Common Platform)
• Experience and knowledge of Kubernetes and management tools such as Helm