Principal Platform Engineer

Who you are

• Designing and operating internal developer platforms at scale
• Building reusable platform services, tooling, and self-service capabilities
• Applying platform-as-a-product principles to improve developer experience
• Establishing standards and paved-road approaches that enable engineering teams to work independently
• Designing highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud-native architectures
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, identity, and security
• Experience making architectural trade-offs across reliability, scalability, performance, cost, and developer experience
• Infrastructure as Code and automated cloud provisioning
• CI/CD and automated software delivery
• Automation of operational processes and platform lifecycle management
• Experience establishing repeatable, standardised engineering workflows
• Designing platforms for resilience, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence
• Applying SRE principles and practices to improve availability and reduce operational risk
• Performance analysis, capacity planning, scalability engineering, and proactive reliability improvement
• Establishing meaningful service-level objectives, monitoring, alerting, and operational practices
• Providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams or a wider engineering organisation
• Influencing architecture and technical direction without relying solely on organisational authority
• Leading complex technical initiatives and driving decisions through ambiguity
• Mentoring senior and developing engineers and creating a culture of knowledge sharing and technical excellence

What the job involves

• The Principal Platform Engineer will provide technical leadership in shaping, evolving, and scaling our clients cloud platform
• The role will establish robust, reusable platform capabilities and self-service solutions that enable engineering teams to deliver software faster, more reliably, and with a consistently high developer experience
• The Principal Platform Engineer will operate across architecture, engineering, reliability, automation, and developer enablement, influencing technical strategy while remaining hands-on in the design and delivery of platform capabilities
• Define and evolve the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for a AWS cloud platform
• Design and build scalable, secure, resilient, and reusable platform capabilities
• Develop self-service tooling and services that abstract operational complexity and improve developer productivity
• Drive automation across infrastructure, application delivery, operational processes, and platform management
• Establish and promote platform standards, engineering patterns, and best practices across engineering teams
• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational efficiency of the platform
• Identify opportunities to reduce engineering friction, eliminate repetitive work, and accelerate software delivery
• Establish engineering principles and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining appropriate levels of security, reliability, and governance
• Lead technically complex platform initiatives from discovery and architectural design through implementation and operational adoption
• Influence engineering teams and senior stakeholders on platform strategy, architectural decisions, and technology choices
• Mentor and develop engineers, raising engineering capability and promoting strong platform engineering practices
• Champion a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence