Lead Cloud Platform Engineer

About the role and team

A hands‑on Lead engineer embedded in the client’s platform team, responsible for the reliability, scalability, and evolution of their Kubernetes‑based infrastructure on AWS. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and Dev Ops, owning the day‑to‑day health of containerised workloads while driving improvements to delivery pipelines, Git Ops practices, and managed service configuration. The right candidate is comfortable working autonomously in a mature, opinionated stack and can influence without authority across engineering teams.

This role combines deep hands‑on expertise with team leadership, stakeholder engagement, and delivery planning.

• Own the platform engineering roadmap, working with business and technical stakeholders to prioritise initiatives, surface risks, and align delivery against wider programme goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of platform engineers, providing technical guidance, supporting growth, and maintaining quality and consistency across the team's output.
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for platform‑related matters across engineering, product, and operations teams.
• Support on‑call for the EKS platform.
• Own the operational health and evolution of containerised workloads running on EKS, including Helm chart management and Kustomize‑based environment configuration.
• Drive Git Ops practices using Flux, maintaining, improving, and troubleshooting the reconciliation pipeline across environments.
• Manage and optimise core managed services: EKS, MSK, and RDS, including scaling, patching, cost governance, and incident response.
• Maintain and extend infrastructure‑as‑code using Terraform, ensuring consistency, modularity, and alignment with AWS best practices.
• Support and improve Git Hub Actions CI/CD workflows, including build, test, and deployment pipelines for containerised applications.
• Collaborate with development teams to support the hosting, debugging, and performance of Java/Kotlin and Python‑based services.
• Identify and address platform‑level technical debt, contributing to a roadmap of incremental improvements.

• Kubernetes at production scale, EKS preferred, with strong understanding of networking, RBAC, resource management, and cluster operations.
• Git Ops tooling, Flux (essential), with solid working knowledge of Helm and Kustomize.
• AWS managed services, hands‑on experience with EKS, MSK, and RDS in production environments.
• Terraform, authoring and maintaining modular infrastructure‑as‑code across multiple environments.
• Git Hub Actions, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for containerised workloads.
• Application‑layer awareness, ability to support and troubleshoot Java/Kotlin and/or Python services running in containers.
• Strong operational mindset, with experience owning incident management, on‑call frameworks, and post‑incident review processes.
• Proven experience leading a platform or infrastructure engineering team, including mentoring, performance support, and day‑to‑day team management.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, able to engage confidently with technical and non‑technical audiences, translate complexity into clear priorities, and manage competing demands.

We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, friendly culture with smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.

We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or Create Future offices when needed.

We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Candidates for this role must be eligible to live and work in the UK.