Senior Platform Engineer in London

About Us: ClearRoute is an engineering consultancy bridging Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms and Developer Experience. We help enterprises reliably bring high-impact digital products to market faster, cheaper, and safer, working with technology leaders facing complex business challenges. We take as much pride in our people, culture and work-life balance as we do in making better software. We’re not just making better software. We’re making the making of software better. Collaborative, entrepreneurial and dedicated to problem solving, we bring the step change our customers need to sustain innovation. Our values challenge us to do the best we can for ClearRoute, our customers and most importantly our team. This is an opportunity for you to build the organisation from the ground up, use your voice to drive change and help transform organisations and problem domains. We work in a hybrid way, with two days a week onsite in our London (Farringdon) office, the rest working remotely.

Role: This workstream focuses on the underlying Azure platform foundations that the other AI / agentic workstreams build on. The team will stand up and harden shared Azure platform capabilities — identity, networking, CI/CD, observability, and environment management — so delivery teams can ship quickly and safely. Working as part of the team, the Platform Engineer is needed to make the AI platform being delivered easy, safe and fast to build on. The role will sit between platform engineering and the product teams. The objective is to turn the infrastructure, model-serving and evaluation tooling into paved roads that engineers actually want to use. This role will build golden paths, developer tooling and self-service capabilities, and coach the teams to adopt them. Success means product teams ship AI features faster, with less toil and fewer surprises in production.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build golden paths for AI workloads: templates and scaffolding for new services, RAG pipelines, agents and model-backed APIs, with CI/CD, observability and security built in.
• Run the internal developer platform: maintain the developer portal (e.g. Backstage), service catalogue, self-service environments and infrastructure-as-code modules.
• Enable model access and serving: standardise how teams call LLM providers and self-hosted models through a shared gateway, with routing, rate limits, caching, cost tracking and key management.
• Make evaluation routine: integrate eval frameworks, prompt and model versioning, and regression testing into the delivery pipeline so quality is measured before release.
• Bake in guardrails: work with security to embed PII handling, prompt-injection defences, content filtering, audit logging and policy-as-code into the default path.
• Improve observability: provide tracing, token usage and latency dashboards, and cost visibility per team and per feature.
• Enable people, not just tools: write docs and runbooks, run onboarding sessions and office hours, pair with product teams, and gather feedback to shape the platform roadmap.
• Measure developer experience: track adoption, lead time and friction points, and remove the biggest blockers each quarter.

Required Experience:

• 4+ years in platform, DevOps, SRE or infrastructure engineering, with time spent supporting other engineering teams.
• Strong hands-on cloud experience (AWS, Azure or GCP) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi or similar).
• Kubernetes and containers in production, including deployment patterns, scaling and troubleshooting.
• CI/CD design and ownership (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar), plus GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux.
• Solid coding skills in Python and at least one of Go or TypeScript.
• Practical experience building or integrating with LLM-based applications: provider APIs, embeddings, vector stores or RAG patterns.
• Observability fundamentals: metrics, logs and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog or similar).
• A product mindset about internal platforms: you treat developers as customers and measure whether they adopt what you build.

Desirable Experience:

• Experience with RAG architectures and vector databases (for example Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Azure AI Search).
• Familiarity with agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex or the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• LLM observability and evaluation tools such as LangSmith, Langfuse, Arize or Weights & Biases.
• Experience hosting or serving open-weight models (for example vLLM, Hugging Face, SageMaker).
• Awareness of AI governance and regulation, including the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 and GDPR.
• ITIL, Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD) or cloud certifications.
• Experience in a consultancy or client-facing delivery environment, ideally in regulated sectors such as energy or financial services.

Working at ClearRoute:

We have grown from six founders to 180+ people across five countries in three years, and what sets us apart isn't the pace, it's how we grow. Real flexibility, in practice. We trust you to perform at your best and still have a life outside of work, with genuine hybrid working, a home office budget, an open feedback culture where your voice shapes decisions, and time off when life needs it (birthday included). When ClearRoute wins, you win. We offer profit share so success is shared, meaningful recognition for great work, and benefits that look after you and your family, including private healthcare, competitive salary benchmarking, and a confidential employee assistance program covering counselling, mental health support, and financial wellbeing.

A community you'll genuinely want to be part of. Interest based communities like running and book clubs, Women in Tech group, monthly socials, and cross regional events bring people together across the company. An inclusive, collaborative culture where you don't need to conform to succeed, where people support one another and feel comfortable being themselves.

Where meaningful work meets real growth. You will tackle complex, real world problems at the forefront of platform engineering, AI, security, and scalable systems. Your growth is supported by learning budgets, Udemy access, a clear career framework, internal mobility, and thought leadership opportunities that take your impact beyond ClearRoute.

At ClearRoute, we believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes, and inclusion creates the conditions for everyone to thrive. We are proud to have built a family friendly working environment and have many employees who have caring responsibilities alongside work. We welcome applications from people who require flexibility and will be happy to discuss needs on an individual basis. We are committed to fostering a culture where all team members feel respected, supported, and empowered to do their best work. We celebrate individuality and our differences and understand that some differences may mean that you require changes made to the interview process. We are happy to cater to your needs to make the interview accessible, if this is something you require please let us know by emailing us at