Lead Platform Engineer

Overview

As our Lead Platform Engineer, you’ll play a crucial role in shaping the future of our engineering platform. You’ll set the standards, define the strategy, and lead the delivery of a secure, scalable, and developer‑friendly ecosystem that empowers product teams to ship faster and more confidently via our internal developer portal.

You’ll act as both a hands‑on technical authority and a mentor, driving modern engineering practices, championing platform excellence, and ensuring our infrastructure evolves in line with a growing and ambitious business.

This is a hybrid role with occasional onsite collaboration — typically once every 2–3 months, but you are able to attend our offices as much as you like, — at either our Liverpool or Welwyn Garden City offices. From time to time, you may also travel between sites.

• Shape and evolve the core of our platform — leading the design, build, and continuous improvement of essential infrastructure such as AKS clusters, networking, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, API gateways, and the internal developer portal’s self‑service capabilities
• Set the standards that teams rely on, defining and enforcing engineering best practices that ensure consistency, scalability, and operational excellence across the organisation.
• Drive strategies for critical non‑functional areas — including security, reliability, performance, and cost optimisation — ensuring the platform meets the demands of a modern, growing business.
• Work hand‑in‑hand with product and engineering leaders to influence architecture decisions and align platform capabilities with both technical and business goals
• Elevate the developer experience by championing automation, great documentation, intuitive self‑service, and a platform that removes friction from delivery.
• Oversee and improve incident management, leading root‑cause analysis, implementing preventative measures, and fostering a culture of resilience
• Mentor and empower a high‑performing team, providing technical guidance, coaching, and an environment where platform engineers can thrive.
• Embed Dev Sec Ops  principles into everything we do, ensuring security, monitoring, compliance, and automation are built in from the start.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies, helping shape our long‑term platform strategy and ensuring we invest in the right tools, patterns, and practices.
• Collaborate across the organisation to drive adoption, influence engineering behaviours, and ensure the platform delivers measurable impact.

• A strong technical foundation, whether through a Computer Science/IT degree or equivalent hands‑on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure and automation at scale.
• Proven experience leading platform or infrastructure teams within a cloud-native environment.
• Deep technical expertise in containerisation (Kubernetes, AKS) and cloud architecture (Azure preferred).
• Demonstrated success in evolving CI/CD practices and automation pipelines that enable developer productivity and operational reliability.
• Strong understanding of network, container, and infrastructure security best practices.
• Experience administering and optimising Linux-based systems.
• Strategic thinking with the ability to balance long-term vision and short-term deliverables.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills with a track record of influencing at multiple levels (technical and business).
• Experience driving a culture of reliability, performance, and continuous improvement.

• Hands-on experience with Kustomize, Helm, Port.io
• Experience with Azure Dev Ops or similar CI/CD tooling.
• Proficiency in Bash, Power Shell, or Python scripting.
• Knowledge of tools for validating Kubernetes YAML and configuration quality.
• Certification in Kubernetes, Azure, or cloud architecture.
• Experience designing and operating highly available and distributed systems.

• Holiday purchase scheme, with 25 days holiday plus bank holidays as standard.
• On-site gym at our office (Free), and nationwide corporate rate gym membership
• Online benefits portal where you can access…