Principal Platform Engineer

About the job Principal Platform Engineer Remote (UK) | Up to £140k | Must be eligible for SC clearance, no sponsorship available A Series B-backed Data and AI company is hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to help build and shape a new platform function from the ground up, with a clear path to Head of Platform as the business scales. The platform they're building is real-time by design, used by major financial institutions today and moving into public sector work, so latency and scale aren't afterthoughts, they're the whole point. You'll join as a hands-on senior contributor first, owning cloud infrastructure, security and developer enablement, before growing into a genuine leadership seat alongside the founding team. Expect to be defining standards and golden paths rather than following someone else's, and to have real influence over architecture and direction from early on. The stack: AWS-native, event-driven architecture (Kafka/SQS-style), Kubernetes, Terraform, modern CI/CD, plus a meaningful on-prem and networking component given the nature of the clients involved. What we're looking for: Strong hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD Real experience with event-driven or distributed systems Solid grounding in security and governance (IAM, secrets management, least privilege) Comfortable owning direction in an early-stage, ambiguous environment, happy to define things as you go Hungry and ownership-minded over "already done it all", ready to grow into a leadership seat, not coast on what you've built elsewhere This search is being run exclusively through Ocho. Message me directly for a confidential conversation.