Sr Principal Cloud Platform Engineer - DB

Job Summary

The Principal Cloud Platform Engineer - DB builds and runs Database Services as automated, secure, self-service infrastructure, sets the engineering standard within those services, mentors the engineers around them, and treats the teams who consume the platform as customers. The role works through infrastructure-as-code and golden paths rather than manual configuration, uses AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing, and engineers reliability in by defining SLOs, instrumenting for observability and automating away toil.

This is the senior hands-on engineering role in the platform team, insourced at the grades covered by this description while engineering at G7b and below is delivered through managed service partners, so the role integrates and assures partner components as well as building. Engineering roadmap and direction sit with the Engineering Director, reference architecture and standards sit with the Platform Architect, backlog order sits with the Product Owner, and deep reliability engineering sits with the Site Reliability Engineer deployed from Reliability Engineering Operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and automate platform infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths, so that provisioning is repeatable rather than reconstructed each time.

• Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing to accelerate delivery and raise quality, reviewing AI-generated output before it is merged.

• Build self-service capabilities and paved roads that reduce friction for consuming teams, so adoption does not depend on the platform teams availability.

• Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting platforms for observability and automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards.

• Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices and code quality within the platform, and hold them in code review.

• Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes with Reliability Engineering rather than repeating manual recovery.

• Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes.

• Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components, holding partner-delivered engineering to the same standards and code quality as internal work.

• Work the platforms manual task and toil backlog, converting identified candidates into automation and evidencing the effort removed.

• Close observability coverage gaps for the platform, so that reliability can be measured rather than inferred.

• Contribute engineering-led items to the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, including technical debt, upgrade and automation work, with the cost of not doing them stated.

• Apply the reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect, and raise a case for change rather than diverging locally.

  Education Professional Qualifications

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics).

• Relevant technical certifications desirable (e.g., a recognised cloud certification for AWS, GCP or Azure, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or a network vendor certification relevant to the platform).

  Area of Specialisation

Hands-on platform engineering in cloud, network or digital workplace, covering infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and containers where relevant.

Automation-first and secure-by-default engineering, with an SRE mindset covering SLOs, observability and toil reduction.

Related Experience Required

• Overall, 15 Years and Typically 6-8 years in cloud, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.

• Strong experience as Database Engineer and/or Architect

• Deep understanding of Relational Database technologies (MSSQL, PostgreSQL)

• Understanding of modern database storage technologies (NoSQL, Caching Services, Time-Series Database, Vector Database, Spatial Database)

• Experience as a DBA

• Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, and with containers and Kubernetes where relevant to the platform.

• Track record building self-service capability that other teams adopted without hand-holding.

• Experience instrumenting for observability, defining SLOs and reducing toil through automation.

• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling, including judgement about when generated output is not fit to merge.

  Desirable

• Proficient in building solutions using container services - AKS GKE

• Hands-on experience deploying container solutions, including Docker containers, and managing K8s deployments using YAML and Helm charts

• Familiarity with multi-cloud deployments using cloud tools like Camunda, GitHub Action, Azure Arc, Google Anthos etc.

• Familiarity and hands on with Traditional Database Products (Oracle)

• Knowledge of cloud cost methodology.

• Knowledge of Pharma practices, GxP, Validation, Audit readiness and how to optimize delivery to accommodate these critical practices

  Skills/Background

• Automation-first instinct, treating a repeated manual task as a defect rather than as work.

• Code review discipline, holding quality without becoming a bottleneck.

• Mentoring ability with engineers of varying experience, including partner engineers outside the line.

• Judgement about when AI-generated code is fit to merge and when it is not.

• Customer mindset toward consuming teams, who can route around a platform that is hard to use.

• Willingness to make technical debt and its cost visible rather than absorbing it silently.

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