Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer

The Senior Platform Engineer is the senior engineer who owns WME Enterprise IT's platform estate — the cloud and core platforms the business runs on, with Microsoft Azure at the center. The role builds, automates, secures, and continuously improves these platforms, within the enterprise architecture and standards set by the Principal Enterprise Architect. It manages platforms, not people: there are no direct reports.

The role sets how WME's platforms are engineered and operated — landing-zone and subscription design, infrastructure-as-code, configuration and policy-as-code, observability, resilience, and cost. It establishes the standards and automation that keep the estate consistent, secure, scalable, and cost-effective, and partners with the teams that run day-to-day operations so the platforms stay reliable as they evolve.

This role owns the engineering of the platform estate and is fenced explicitly against adjacent functions:

• In scope: deep engineering of the IT platform estate — Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud (landing zones, subscriptions, management groups), infrastructure-as-code, configuration and policy-as-code, platform observability and monitoring, platform resilience and DR posture, platform-level security guardrails, and cloud cost / Fin Ops — implemented within the enterprise architecture and standards set by the Principal Enterprise Architect.
• Relationship to the Principal Enterprise Architect: this role builds and operates within the cloud / platform standards #55 sets, and feeds real-world platform learnings back into those standards. It owns the deep engineering, build, operation, and product-project work — not the enterprise standards themselves.
• Alongside the server & cloud infrastructure function: that team operates and runs the underlying infrastructure day to day — compute, virtualization, server lifecycle, and routine cloud operations. This role owns the platform architecture, automation, and engineering standards the estate is built and governed by; the infrastructure team operates within those standards. Where the two meet — cloud infrastructure in particular — this role sets the engineering standard and senior leadership adjudicates any blurred lines.
  
  (Confirm this split before posting.)
• Alongside network engineering: the network underlay remains with network engineering; this role owns platform-level networking patterns in the cloud (landing-zone networking, connectivity design) in partnership.
• Distinct from AI & digital workplace engineering: that role owns AI in the M365 / end-user digital workplace; this role owns the AI platform services and infrastructure within the estate. The two coordinate where AI tooling and platform patterns overlap.

Enterprise IT runs on one idea: operational excellence — platforms that just work, problems fixed at the root, and an engineering bar that keeps climbing. As a senior platform engineer, this role holds that bar high across the estate. Six operating foundations describe how the IT function works, and a Senior engineer here models all six.

• Service management, done right. Brings ITIL and service-management discipline into platform design and operation, so the estate is reliable by default — and codifies the patterns others follow.
• Continual improvement. Treats every recurring failure, metric, and cost signal as input; ships measurable platform improvements and retires toil.
• AI fluency. Operates at the leading edge of AI-augmented engineering and owns how AI platform services are provisioned, secured, and run across the estate.
• Ownership and documentation. Owns the platform estate end to end and leaves reference architectures, runbooks, and decision records that scale beyond any one engineer.
• Security and risk by default. Builds security into the platform — landing-zone guardrails, least privilege, policy-as-code — and partners with governance where decisions carry real weight.
• Cost and reliability discipline. Treats cost and reliability as first-class platform outcomes; engineers the estate to be resilient, observable, and economically run.