Principal Platform Engineer

Location: London, United Kingdom (Hybrid – Minimum 1 Day Per Week in Office)

Employment Type: Full-time

Are you an experienced Principal Engineer with a passion for building and operating large-scale distributed systems and database platforms? We're looking for a hands‑on technical leader to help shape the future of our platform engineering capability. This is an opportunity to lead complex engineering initiatives, define technical strategy, and act as a subject matter expert across AWS infrastructure, distributed databases, Terraform and cloud‑native platform services.

You'll work closely with architects, engineers and senior stakeholders to design resilient, scalable and secure platform solutions while mentoring engineers and driving engineering best practices across the organisation.

• Lead the design and engineering of secure, scalable and highly available cloud platforms
• Build and manage AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Design, deploy and operate distributed systems and persistence platforms
• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams
• Define engineering standards, platform roadmaps and best practices
• Drive automation, resilience, observability and operational excellence initiatives
• Support and mentor engineers through code reviews, coaching and technical leadership
• Collaborate with architects and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Deliver highly resilient, secure and performant infrastructure solutions
• Act as the technical authority for distributed database and persistence technologies

• 8+ years' experience in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Dev Ops, SRE or Software Engineering
• Strong Infrastructure as Code expertise with Terraform
• Strong Linux systems administration and networking knowledge
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Hands‑on experience deploying and managing distributed database platforms
• Deep understanding of SQL vs No
  
  SQL databases, ACID principles and CAP theorem
• Experience building highly available and fault‑tolerant architectures
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automation and Dev Ops practices
• Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership

• AWS
• Terraform
• Couchbase
• Kafka
• Observability & Monitoring Platforms
• Distributed Database Technologies

• Experience with additional distributed persistence technologies
• Background in large-scale cloud-native environments
• Experience defining enterprise platform strategy and architecture roadmaps
• Strong understanding of messaging and event streaming architectures
• Experience leading technical initiatives in complex matrix organisations

This role is ideal for someone who has personally built, deployed and operated distributed

database platforms—not simply consumed managed services—and is looking to take ownership of technical direction while remaining hands‑on with engineering delivery. If you're a Principal Engineer who thrives on solving complex platform and infrastructure challenges, we'd love to hear from you.