Principal Platform Engineer

About the job Role Overview We are looking for a senior-level Platform Engineer to help shape and scale the next phase of our engineering and platform capability. This role is focused on building a secure, reliable, developer-friendly platform function that enables engineering teams to deliver quickly and safely. The successful candidate will initially operate as a hands-on senior technical contributor while helping define the foundations of a future platform engineering capability within the organisation. Over time, this role is expected to evolve into a broader platform leadership position (Head of Platform) as the company and engineering organisation scales. This is not a traditional “ops support” role. The focus is on platform enablement, automation, operational maturity, resilience, and improving developer experience across engineering delivery. The role will contribute directly to the scalability and operational maturity of both internal systems and customer-facing products by building reusable platform capabilities, operational patterns, and shared engineering infrastructure. Key Responsibilities Platform Engineering & Infrastructure Design, build, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure and platform tooling Improve reliability, observability, deployment automation, and operational resilience Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and engineering workflows Support infrastructure-as-code and automation-first operational practices Standardise and improve engineering environments and deployment processes Build scalable operational foundations for distributed and cloud-native systems Product & Platform Enablement Contribute directly to the scalability and operational maturity of core products and services Build reusable platform capabilities and shared operational primitives for engineering teams Support event streaming and messaging infrastructure patterns Develop scalable storage and provisioning patterns (e.g. object storage / S3-based workflows) Implement repeatable deployment and environment orchestration approaches Support secrets management and configuration management patterns Improve authentication, auditability, logging, and observability foundations Build secure-by-default operational patterns and reusable platform abstractions Reduce repeated operational complexity across engineering teams Developer Enablement Improve developer experience and reduce operational friction for engineering teams Build self-service capabilities and reusable platform patterns where appropriate Support engineering teams with operational tooling, environment management, and deployment workflows Help establish platform standards and golden paths for delivery teams Reduce cognitive load and operational dependency for engineering teams Security & Governance Collaboration Work closely with security and engineering leadership to operationalise security controls and governance requirements Support RBAC implementation, access governance, auditability, and break-glass procedures Ensure platform implementations align with security and compliance expectations Contribute to operational resilience and continuity planning Embed governance and security guardrails into platform workflows and automation Operational Support & Reliability Support incident response and operational troubleshooting where required Improve monitoring, alerting, and observability across environments Help establish operational SLAs and support workflows Reduce key-person dependency and operational risk across platform systems Contribute to scalable operational support and reliability practices Platform Capability Development Contribute to the evolution of the platform engineering function Help define operational processes, standards, and tooling strategy Mentor engineers on platform and operational best practices Contribute to long-term platform architecture and operational maturity Help shape the future internal developer platform and engineering enablement strategy Required Experience & Skills Technical Experience Strong experience in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or cloud infrastructure roles Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) Strong infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, etc.) Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines Strong Linux/containerisation/Kubernetes experience Experience with observability, monitoring, and operational tooling Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or streaming platforms Experience implementing scalable deployment and platform patterns Strong automation and scripting capabilities Security & Governance Awareness Good understanding of RBAC, IAM, secrets management, and operational security practices Experience working within secure or regulated environments Understanding of auditability, operational governance, and least-privilege principles Ability to operationalise security controls Familiarity with secure-by-default infrastructure and platform design principles Engineering & Delivery Mindset Strong collaboration skills with engineering teams Focus on enablement Delivery-oriented mindset Ability to balance speed, reliability, security, and operational simplicity Comfortable operating in a scaling growth-stage environment Strong systems thinking and platform-oriented problem solving Key Competencies Systems thinking Automation-first mindset Operational ownership and accountability Strong communication and collaboration skills Calmness under operational pressure Ability to reduce complexity and improve engineering flow Strong platform and enablement mindset Success Measures Improved engineering delivery velocity Reduced operational bottlenecks Reduced infrastructure and access-related friction Increased platform reliability and resilience Reduction in manual operational processes Improved auditability and operational governance Increased reuse of shared platform capabilities and operational patterns Reduced key-person dependency across platform systems Positive engineering feedback on platform enablement and developer experience Improved scalability and operational consistency across products and environments Role Evolution Path This role is intended to evolve as the organisation scales. Over time, the successful candidate is expected to: Help build and shape the platform engineering function Define platform operational standards and processes Take increasing ownership of platform strategy and operational governance Build scalable internal platform capabilities and engineering enablement tooling Potentially grow into a Head of Platform leadership role As the company matures, the future platform organisation may include: Platform engineering DevOps/SRE capability Infrastructure operations Internal developer platform tooling Operational reliability and observability Access and operational governance implementation Platform enablement and engineering productivity functions Reporting Structure Initially reporting to: CTO Working closely with: Engineering leadership Security/platform architecture functions Data engineering teams Technical leads across delivery pods The role is expected to become a key leadership function within the future engineering and platform organisation.