Junior Platform Engineer

An early-career engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. Security or observability background — either is welcome.

You have been working for eighteen months to three years in a hands‑on technical role — a platform team, a SOC or security engineering team, an MSP or MSSP, an infrastructure or Dev Ops team, a vendor’s support or professional services desk — and you are looking for your first move. You have had your hands on something that runs in production and matters to somebody.

You want to go deeper, faster, in a smaller business where the work you do is seen. This is not a graduate scheme and it is not a helpdesk. It is a real engineering seat with real customers, real supervision and a clear path up.

Apto Solutions is a Bristol business that runs telemetry, observability and SIEM platforms for other organisations. Banks, airports, energy companies, engineering firms and government bodies depend on those platforms to tell them whether their systems are healthy and whether they are under attack. When those platforms are quietly working, nobody notices. When they are not, our customers find out the hard way.

Our job is to make sure they never do.

We work across Splunk, Cribl, Microsoft Sentinel, Grafana, Datadog and Open Telemetry. We are a partner‑led business with deep vendor relationships, and we build a lot of our own platform tooling on top. We are small, profitable and growing fast — the plan is to triple the business by 2028 — and we are hiring engineers who want to grow with it rather than be carried by it.

This is a hands‑on engineering role inside Operate, our managed service. You will help run customer telemetry platforms day to day, improve them, and contribute to the platform that lets us run them well. You will do this as part of a small engineering pool, with a senior engineer checking your work before it reaches a customer and a line manager who is accountable for your development.

Operate has two shapes and you will work in both.

Operate Core is always‑on. It is continuous ownership of a customer’s platform — health, ingestion, data quality, alerting, upgrades, capacity. There is no handover and no final deliverable. The platform is ours to keep healthy for as long as the customer is ours. Success is measured in the absence of surprises and in the platform being demonstrably better in six months than it is today.

Operate Attach is sprint‑based improvement. A customer has a defined problem — noisy alerts, a data source that will not normalise, ingest costs running away, a detection gap, a migration — and we take a scoped block of work and fix it. Attach has a start, a shape and an end. It sits on top of Core, for the same customers, with the same engineers.

Alongside that you will take a share of professional services delivery: shorter, project‑shaped engagements that are usually how a customer first meets us.

Everything below is done with supervision at first and with increasing independence as you show you can carry it. We will be explicit with you about where that line is and how it moves.

Ingestion pipelines, data quality, alerting, licensing and capacity, upgrades and patching. You will start by owning a slice of a named customer estate, and you will be expected to notice problems before the customer does.

Triage, diagnosis and resolution — and then the harder part, which is the root cause and the permanent fix so it does not come back.

Detections, dashboards, parsers, normalisation, alert rules, pipeline routing — built properly, peer reviewed, version controlled, documented.

Taking a defined piece…