Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to lead the design and delivery of secure, cloud‑native platforms for large‑scale public sector clients. The role combines hands‑on engineering with strategic influence over platform standards, governance and developer experience.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and improve secure cloud platforms, internal developer platforms and reusable engineering capabilities.
• Design secure multi‑account AWS landing zones and cloud platforms.
• Build internal developer platforms and self‑service capabilities.
• Design and operate production‑grade Kubernetes platforms (EKS, AKS, OpenShift).
• Define engineering standards, golden paths, reusable modules and platform patterns.
• Build observability strategies using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry and modern APM tooling.
• Improve reliability through SLOs, incident reviews and SRE practices.
• Embed DevSecOps, supply‑chain security and secure CI/CD practices.
• Drive cloud‑native modernisation and legacy transformation.
• Support FinOps and cloud optimisation across large estates.
• Lead design reviews, technical workshops and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with architects, engineering teams and senior stakeholders to solve complex platform challenges.

Required profile

• Strong experience with AWS cloud platforms and multi‑account landing zones.
• Extensive hands‑on work with Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, OpenShift) and production‑grade clusters.
• Proficiency in Terraform or other Infrastructure‑as‑Code tools.
• Experience delivering CI/CD automation and GitOps pipelines (ArgoCD, Flux).
• Background in building internal developer platforms or self‑service engineering.
• Knowledge of observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Datadog, Dynatrace or New Relic.
• Solid understanding of DevSecOps, supply‑chain security and secure software delivery.
• Practical experience with Site Reliability Engineering, SLO/SLI definition and incident management.

Required skills

• AWS
• Kubernetes
• EKS
• AKS
• OpenShift
• Terraform
• Infrastructure as Code
• CI/CD automation
• ArgoCD
• Flux
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry
• ELK
• Datadog
• Dynatrace
• New Relic
• DevSecOps
• Supply‑chain security
• SRE
• FinOps

What we offer

• Salary range £90,000 – £110,000 per year plus benefits.
• Hybrid working model with up to 6 days per month in the office.
• Opportunity to work on national‑scale digital services for the public sector.
• Security clearance (SC cleared or eligible) required.
• Access to a major platform engineering growth programme.