Staff Platform Engineer

About Birdie

Birdie is the leading home healthcare technology platform that aims to radically transform the lives of older adults. Its all-in-one solution supports around 4.8 million care visits every month, equipping care providers with the tools they need to deliver better quality care and improve efficiency across most day-to-day operations. This enables us to collect over 1.5 billion data points on care recipient wellbeing each year, making Birdie the holder of the largest structured community healthcare dataset in Europe. Birdie was founded in 2017, a B-Corp certified company that leverages technology to reimagine home care. With a total raise to date of $55M, we secured our Series B funding in 2022 led by Sofina, Omers, and Index Ventures, fuelling our mission to transform care. Recognised for its innovation and impact, we have received numerous accolades, including ranking 6th in the 2023 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 and 21st in Deloitte's EMEA Technology Fast 500 in 2024. We joined Tech Nation's prestigious Future Fifty 2024 cohort and was featured in the Sifted 100 list of fastest-growing UK & Ireland startups in 2024. Furthermore, Birdie was named an NHS England Assured Supplier for Digital Social Care Records in 2023 and won the Innovative Solutions in Home Care Award at the 2024 Leaders in Care Awards.

Your mission?

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you’ll contribute to influence and shape both the strategy and implementation of our Platform function at Birdie; working with the Platform team, you’ll develop and expand on our current Kubernetes micro-services architecture, building and maintaining abstractions and services for our Core engineering teams. Whilst also acting as the technical leader for the Platform, coaching fellow Platform engineers and Software engineers, working with the Platform Lead, fellow Staff engineers and our CTO to develop strategy. You’ll be championing reliability and stability across the Engineering Organisation, instilling SRE principles within teams and leaving your mark on our product. You’ll be a key part of our “shift-left” DevOps success, whether it’s security best-practices, CI/CD, solid production considerations or just leveraging AWS to its fullest - you’ll be at the forefront of our non-functional strategies.

Who are we looking for?

• Are passionate about the entire spectrum of reliability engineering and taking a leadership IC role for a scaling company.
• Experienced with writing code to solve DevOps/Platform problems and are a pragmatic problem-solver, knowing when to build vs buy.
• Able to handle ambiguity and uncertainty, adjusting your approach where suitable; You can deliver initiatives from end to end, working with cross functional peers from problem to solution.
• Are someone who gets things done and is willing to step up, roll up your sleeves and take responsibility. You’re also a clear communicator, negotiator and influencer.
• Appreciate the product mindset, dedicated to understanding user (developer) needs and driving innovation to enhance the overall user experience.
• Able to work efficiently in a cross-functional team setting and with a high degree of self-motivation and accountability.
• You follow best practice for the technologies you work with and understand why.
• You're intensely curious, love learning new things and teaching others about them, acting as a mentor to other team members.

What skills do you need?

• Expertise in AWS and cloud-native architecture patterns.
• Expertise in Kubernetes (specifically EKS) and K8s-native tooling (ie - Helm).
• Comfortable in a coding and scripting language.
• Have proficiency with leveraging modern tracing, metrics and related observability topics - i.e. Open Telemetry.
• Expertise in creating strong CI/CD pipelines and adapting to the feedback you gain from them, working with GitOps.
• Experience working in a security-conscious engineering organisation, with proficiencies in DevSecOps principles.
• Clear understanding of SRE practices, goals and implementations.
• A deep capacity to get things done.
• Are someone who is inspired by, and seeks to embody our values.

What are the benefits?

People are our core strength. We are social entrepreneurs, boasting an outstanding culture with strong values (B-Corp certified). We offer intentional benefits and invest in our team's growth, satisfaction and ability to thrive:

• Compensation: Our salary packages are competitive, the role is £105k - £125k per annum. We also grant generous stock options to any permanent employee at the end of the probation period. We adjust salaries based on the cost of living index for employees based outside of the UK.
• Location: This role will need to be based in the UK. We organise regular in-person events and online socials to make sure you can meet up with peers. Birdie does not currently support any visa applications and therefore we do require permanent right to work in the UK.
• L&D budget: Learning and growing is a fundamental part of Birdie life. You'll have an annual personal development budget to put towards books, courses, trainings and conferences; continuous coaching within the team and with external experts.
• Work From Home budget: Making your workspace comfortable is important to us, you’ll have access to a WFH equipment budget to ensure you have what you need.
• Paid time off: We offer 33 days of holiday (inclusive of bank holidays) and close between Christmas and New Years outside of this. We also support you in celebrating the big moments, all Birdies get an extra “Birthday” day off and can choose to take it at any point in the year.
• Birdie giving days: Birdie is a B-corp and we care deeply about ethical and social impact. Birdie will pay you for 2 days of volunteering (to a cause you’re passionate about) each year.
• Sabbaticals: We want Birdies to stick around for a while! After 4 years you can choose to take a sabbatical of up to 3 months.
• Private health insurance & Gym and wellbeing discounts: Comprehensive health insurance with AXA that covers many physical and mental health costs. Gym discounts and numerous other wellbeing perks via Happl.
• Cycle to work scheme: Birdie will buy a bike up-front and you can salary sacrifice to pay-off over the next 12-36 months.
• Parental Leave: Highly favourable parental leave policy; once you have spent twelve consecutive months on our payroll, primary caregivers are entitled to 26 weeks of parental leave at 100% of your usual salary and secondary caregivers are entitled to 12 weeks of parental leave, at 100% of your usual salary.
• Fertility Leave: Birdie recognises the emotional and physical challenges of fertility treatment and investigations, and supports all Birdies by offering 5 additional paid days of leave.
• Employer pension contribution: Birdie contributes 4% of your salary to your pension when you contribute 5% (UK Birdies).
• Frequent company socials, trips and meals: We organise many socials, quarterly retreats and annual company-wide retreats.
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging: At Birdie, we're committed to creating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. It's essential to us that you’re able to bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or otherwise and all applicants will be considered for employment without attention to these aspects.

If you have any questions regarding the interview process, or if you need any reasonable adjustments to be made, please don’t hesitate to contact us.