Principal Platform Engineer

Entity:

Technology

Job Family Group:

IT&S Group

Job Description:

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor role responsible for defining the strategy and architecture for how bp’s portfolio of engineering and data platforms connect, converge, and serve the organisation. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise architecture, providing technical leadership and strategic direction without direct line management.

The role exists to bring coherence to a distributed platform landscape, ensuring that internal engineering platforms, cloud-native infrastructure, and enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are integrated in a consistent, scalable, and well-governed manner. The Principal Platform Engineer is the technical authority on platform integration and convergence, influencing design decisions across teams and functions.

Key Accountabilities

• Define and maintain a platform convergence strategy that articulates the current-state landscape, the target architecture, and a credible transition path — enabling bp’s engineering platforms and SaaS solutions to operate as an integrated whole.
• Lead architectural design and decision-making at the intersection of internal platforms and enterprise SaaS, establishing integration patterns, data contracts, and governance standards that apply consistently across the platform estate.
• Act as the principal technical authority for platform engineering across the digital delivery organisation, providing expert guidance on platform design, cloud-native patterns, and systems integration to engineering teams and senior stakeholders.
• Drive resolution of complex cross-platform integration challenges, including identity, data flow, event-driven architecture, and API design — ensuring that integration decisions are durable, secure, and aligned with enterprise standards.
• Produce and maintain high-quality architecture strategy documents, reference architectures, and decision records that are accessible to both engineering and executive audiences, building shared understanding of the platform direction.
• Collaborate with AI engineering, software engineering, and external vendor and partner teams to ensure that platform architecture decisions enable and do not constrain the delivery of business and AI-powered capabilities.

This is a role with organisation-wide technical influence. The successful candidate will work closely with engineering managers, delivery teams, and external partners across a complex, multi-platform environment. The role requires a balance of critical thinking and hands-on technical credibility — candidates should be comfortable both authoring architecture strategy documents and engaging deeply in technical design discussions.

• Extensive experience in platform engineering (including Kubernetes) and the design, delivery, and operation of large-scale, multi-component platform estates in a cloud-native environment.
• Proven enterprise architecture capability, including experience producing target-state architecture strategies and navigating complex system landscapes spanning internal platforms and third-party SaaS.
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns: containerisation and orchestration, service mesh, API gateway design, event streaming, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Demonstrable experience integrating enterprise SaaS solutions — including ERP or business application platforms — with internally developed systems, covering API, identity, and data integration patterns.
• Track record of operating as a senior technical authority in a large organisation, influencing architecture and engineering decisions at scale without direct management responsibility.
• Strong communication and documentation skills, with the ability to convey complex architectural concepts clearly to technical peers, delivery teams, and senior business stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical subject area or equivalent experience.
• Familiarity with regulatory and compliance considerations (e.g., data residency, audit logging, access…