Platform Engineer; Junior to Mid-Level

Platform Engineer (Junior to Mid-Level)

Permanent Full Time | Hybrid | Gateshead | £35-45,000

We're looking for a Platform Engineer to join our growing team at Vertu Motors Plc. You'll help build and maintain the infrastructure that powers engineering across our 190+ dealerships, including systems that serve 7,500+ colleagues and support a business with yearly revenue exceeding £4bn.

This is a chance to work on meaningful problems: enabling developer productivity at scale, improving system reliability, and architecting solutions that directly impact how we serve customers and run our business. You'll be part of a growing platform team supporting 6+ engineering squads (50+ developers), which means your work has real visibility and impact.

We're looking for someone who's technically curious and wants to grow into platform engineering. Maybe you've been doing Dev Ops or software development and want to specialise in infrastructure and developer tooling. You'll work with AWS, containers, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code, and learn from experienced engineers while solving real production challenges.

This role is hybrid. The successful candidate will be ideally based in the Northeast and will be working approximately three days per week at our head office in Gateshead. We are open to considering fully remote candidates for the right person, with the expectation that they would travel to our head office in Gateshead at least once a month.

Your first 30 days will focus on getting familiar with our AWS environments, understanding how our teams work, and making small improvements to existing systems. By 90 days, you'll be contributing to infrastructure projects alongside the team; your work could include refining our ECS deployments, improving monitoring, or helping teams with architecture questions. At 6 months, you'll be comfortable working in various parts of our platform, collaborating with application teams to solve their infrastructure needs, and proposing improvements based on what you've learned.

This isn't a solo role. You'll pair with senior engineers, participate in architecture reviews, and help train development teams on tooling and best practices. We value psychological safety and collaborative problem-solving over individual heroics.

You'll need:

• Hands-on AWS experience, particularly with networking fundamentals (VPCs, DNS, load balancing)
• Comfort with Linux command line—troubleshooting issues, analysing logs, writing Bash scripts
• Experience with containers (we use ECS, but Docker or other orchestration tools work too)
• Basic SQL and relational database knowledge
• Some exposure to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform is our tool, but similar experience counts)
• CI/CD pipeline experience—building or maintaining them
• Coding ability in at least one language like Type Script, Python, or Go
• Willingness to context-switch between different tech stacks and learn new tools

Bonus points for:

• Dynamo
  
  DB or No
  
  SQL data modelling experience
• Aurora Postgre
  
  SQL or RDS operational knowledge
• Serverless architectures (Lambda, event-driven patterns)
• Application modernisation projects (monolith breakdowns, containerisation efforts)
• Previous work supporting multiple engineering teams as an internal platform

You'll be working within a high-volume, low-margin industry where operational efficiency matters. Our platform work directly enables the business because downtime affects real sales, real colleagues, real customers. You'll need to balance moving fast with building things that last.

We're a team that values learning and honest communication over perfection. You'll get things wrong sometimes, we all do. What matters is how quickly we learn, adapt, and support each other.

We've been operating for 20 years under the same leadership team, which brings genuine organisational stability. We recently completed a major "One Vertu" transformation, consolidating multiple brands into a unified platform. Our engineering work focuses on three areas: serving customers who buy vehicles, empowering our colleagues to deliver excellent service, and driving business efficiency…