Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

Darktrace is a global leader in AI for cybersecurity that keeps organizations ahead of the changing threat landscape every day. Founded in 2013, Darktrace provides the essential cybersecurity platform protecting nearly 10,000 organizations from unknown threats using its proprietary AI. The Darktrace Active AI Security Platform™ delivers a proactive approach to cyber resilience to secure the business across the entire digital estate – from network to cloud to email.

As a Mid-level Platform Engineer in R&D, you'll join the Platform Team to design, build, and maintain the foundational infrastructure, tooling, and automation that product teams rely on to develop and deliver software efficiently. This is a hands-on role, if you enjoy making developers' lives easier through great tooling, automation, and rock-solid Kubernetes-based infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you. Please note this is a hybrid position, and would require 2 days per week in the Cambridge office.

What will I be doing:

• Running and evolving our Kubernetes platform across multiple environments, ensuring applications are deployed reliably at scale.
• Collaborating with development teams to ensure infrastructure meets their requirements while promoting scalable, cloud-native application practices.
• Operating and improving Kubernetes clusters day-to-day, with a focus on reliability, observability, and performance.
• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines to accelerate software delivery.
• Driving infrastructure-as-code practices using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Staying current with the cloud-native ecosystem, introducing pragmatic solutions to the team, and addressing operational challenges through automation.
• Embedding security into platform design and coaching other teams on best practices.
• Designing solutions and services with security controls engineered to mitigate threats.
• Managing service components to ensure they meet business needs and key performance indicators.
• Liaising with other team members to coordinate changes across components.

What experience do I need:

• Strong Kubernetes experience, at least two years operating, troubleshooting, and scaling clusters in production environments.
• Comfortable with networking, storage, RBAC, and workload scheduling.
• Familiarity with infrastructure provisioning tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation, along with Infrastructure as Code methodologies.
• A good understanding of networking and security principles.
• The ability to solve problems and analyse patterns in behaviour and logs.

Additional qualifications include:

• Experience with continuous integration systems such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins.
• Proficiency in working with source control systems.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with fluency in English both in written and verbal forms.

Nice to have:

• Scripting or programming ability (Python, Bash, Go, or similar) — useful for building tooling and automation but not a prerequisite.
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Familiarity with service mesh, GitOps workflows, or platform-as-a-product thinking.

Benefits:

• 23 days' holiday + all public holidays, rising to 25 days after 2 years of service.
• Additional day off for your birthday.
• Private medical insurance which covers you, your cohabiting partner and children.
• Life insurance of 4 times your base salary.
• Salary sacrifice pension scheme.
• Enhanced family leave.
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program.
• Cycle to work scheme.