Principal Platform Engineer; VMWare Cloud Foundation

Job Description

Salary Range: £53,269 - £71,400

Leonardo UK operates a grade-based salary framework with broad bands. The salary range shown reflects the approved grade band for this role, or a narrower hiring range published within that band, and is benchmarked against the external market. Exceptions above the standard range are managed through governance controls to protect internal equity.

Your Impact

Are you ready to take on complex technical challenges at the forefront of cyber and platform engineering? At Leonardo, our Principal Platform Engineers are hands-on experts who shape the design, integration, and delivery of secure platforms that keep our customers’ missions running. Your work at Leonardo UK will see you take the lead in solving customer problems in an agile, innovative and team-centric manner.

The role may involve a blended hybrid working model, with a mixture of working from home and working on site at one of our Leonardo offices to ensure close collaboration with the wider team and with our customers.

Leonardo UK is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to join the Cyber & Security Solutions Division team. This role is focused on delivering, maintaining, and improving platform and systems engineering solutions that underpin critical defence, government and public sector services.

What you will do as a Principal Platform Engineer

• Act as the technical authority on one of our platform engineering domains (e.g. virtualisation) providing specialist domain expertise to projects and programmes.
• Lead the design and implementation of secure platforms across on-premise environments.
• Capture, analyse, and interpret complex customer requirements to drive system design and architecture.
• Develop high- and low-level designs, ensuring alignment with secure-by-design principles.
• Take ownership of technical delivery within work packages, including planning, estimation, and progress reporting.
• Mentor, coach, and develop junior and senior engineers, raising technical capability across the community.
• Provide input to technology strategies, feasibility studies, and innovation projects.
• Engage with internal and external stakeholders, presenting technical solutions and justifying design decisions.

• Extensive technical expertise across multiple platform domains, with a track record of delivering secure solutions.
• The ability to balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership and mentorship.
• A problem-solving mindset, able to innovate and recommend the best approach for complex challenges.

• Windows and Linux operating systems
• Virtualisation platforms (VMware, Hyper-V)
• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack (vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, Aria Suite)
• Design, build and operation of software-defined data centre platforms
• Network virtualisation and micro-segmentation concepts (NSX, platform-integrated)
• Networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, firewalls)
• Automation and scripting (Power Shell, Bash, Python, Ansible, Terraform)
• Knowledge of cyber security controls and accreditation requirements
• Experience across the systems engineering lifecycle
• Integration of compute, storage, and network layers into a unified platform
• Delivery within secure / enterprise / defence environments

• VCAP certification
• Expertise with cloud platforms (AWS) and Infrastructure as Code
• Experience integrating enterprise services (Active Directory, PKI, monitoring, SIEM)
• Hands-on use of Dev Sec Ops  tools and CI/CD pipelines
• VxRail and hyper-converged infrastructure
• Automation of VCF lifecycle (patching, upgrades, deployment)
• Integration with enterprise identity and security services (AD, PKI, PAM)
• Containerisation platforms (Kubernetes, Docker)

This is not an exhaustive list, and we are keen to hear from you even if you might not have experience in all the above. The most important skill is a good attitude and willingness to learn.

This role is subject to pre-employment screening in line with the UK Government’s Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS). An additional range of Personnel Security Controls referred to as National Security Vetting (NSV) will apply. This role requires Developed Vetting (DV)…