Principal Platform Engineer; FTC)

Principal Platform Engineer - 12 Month FTC
Who We Are:

AND Digital are a tech company focused on accelerating digital delivery and dedicated to closing the digital skills gap. We've been helping organisations build better digital products and stronger digital teams since 2014.

We believe our work should always leave a legacy for the client. We do this through close relationships with our offices (or 'Clubs') so that our partners are always prioritised by a regional team close to them.

This unique model has driven success for our clients and ourselves, evidenced by our remarkable organic growth since 2014. Today we number more than 1,300 people with Clubs all over the UK and Europe with plans for global expansion in the next couple of years.

Join us - and help us fulfil our mission to close the world's digital skills gap.

The Principal Platform Engineer will provide technical leadership in shaping, evolving, and scaling our clients cloud platform. The role will establish robust, reusable platform capabilities and self-service solutions that enable engineering teams to deliver software faster, more reliably, and with a consistently high developer experience.

The Principal Platform Engineer will operate across architecture, engineering, reliability, automation, and developer enablement, influencing technical strategy while remaining hands-on in the design and delivery of platform capabilities.

• Define and evolve the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for a AWS cloud platform.
• Design and build scalable, secure, resilient, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Develop self-service tooling and services that abstract operational complexity and improve developer productivity.
• Drive automation across infrastructure, application delivery, operational processes, and platform management.
• Establish and promote platform standards, engineering patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational efficiency of the platform.
• Identify opportunities to reduce engineering friction, eliminate repetitive work, and accelerate software delivery.
• Establish engineering principles and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining appropriate levels of security, reliability, and governance.
• Lead technically complex platform initiatives from discovery and architectural design through implementation and operational adoption.
• Influence engineering teams and senior stakeholders on platform strategy, architectural decisions, and technology choices.
• Mentor and develop engineers, raising engineering capability and promoting strong platform engineering practices.
• Champion a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

We are particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate significant experience in:

• Designing and operating internal developer platforms at scale.
• Building reusable platform services, tooling, and self-service capabilities.
• Applying platform-as-a-product principles to improve developer experience.
• Establishing standards and paved-road approaches that enable engineering teams to work independently.

• Designing highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud-native architectures.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, identity, and security.
• Experience making architectural trade-offs across reliability, scalability, performance, cost, and developer experience.

• Infrastructure as Code and automated cloud provisioning.
• CI/CD and automated software delivery.
• Automation of operational processes and platform lifecycle management.
• Experience establishing repeatable, standardised engineering workflows.

• Designing platforms for resilience, fault tolerance, observability, and operational excellence.
• Applying SRE principles and practices to improve availability and reduce operational risk.
• Performance analysis, capacity planning, scalability engineering, and proactive reliability improvement.
• Establishing meaningful service-level objectives, monitoring, alerting, and operational practices.

• Providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams or a wider engineering organisation.
• Influencing architecture and technical direction without relying solely on organisational authority.
• Leading…