Platform Engineer

We live in a world that runs on physical industries like energy, logistics, and manufacturing. These sectors are essential to our economy and daily lives, yet they are held back by inefficiencies, fragile legacy systems, and decades-old ways of working. This is not just a business problem; it is a societal one. When grids fail, supply chains stall, or factories falter, entire economies are disrupted. These companies face unique, complex challenges that typical software was never designed to solve. Cogna was founded to change this. Our mission is to give critical industries their own AI-powered Software Factory: a way to build and deploy bespoke digital tools that solve pressing operational challenges. Since our launch in May 2023, we’ve seen incredible customer traction and revenue growth. We’re backed by leading VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we’re building a world-class team to take on one of the most important challenges of our time. Tackling challenges at this scale takes people who are curious, adaptable, and motivated by impact. If our mission resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement. We are committed to building a diverse team that reflects the industries and societies we serve.

Overview

We’re hiring a Platform Engineer to help design, build, and maintain the foundation our teams rely on every day. You’ll join our Platform team, which supports security, core infrastructure, and DevX across Cogna. Your focus will be shaping the internal platform and cloud architecture that powers all engineering teams and underpins our product. We treat the platform as an internal product: defining APIs, abstractions, and guardrails that let teams ship quickly and safely. This role is ideal for someone who thrives on solving platform-wide challenges, enjoys working cross‑functionally, and is passionate about clean, resilient cloud infrastructure.

What you’ll do

• Design and evolve our cloud infrastructure and internal platform (primarily Azure/Kubernetes-based), including service-to-service communication and workflow orchestration layers (e.g. gRPC, Temporal, Dagster) that power product delivery.
• Make architectural decisions that shape how Cogna builds and operates software.
• Work within and contribute to our Go/Python/TypeScript codebase.
• Own and evolve our build, infrastructure-as-code, and delivery systems (e.g. Bazel, Terraform, CI/CD), optimising for scalability, hermeticity, and developer velocity.
• Implement and own security controls, identity and access management systems, and network configuration policies across our Kubernetes environments.
• Improve and drive observability by implementing logging, tracing, and alerting systems (e.g. Datadog).
• Partner with internal teams to improve resilience, automate toil, and reduce lead time to deployment.
• Drive root cause analysis and reliability improvements from incidents.

What we’re looking for

• Proficient in writing maintainable, testable, and scalable code in real-world, production environments. Language fluency in Python, Typescript, or Go is a plus, but strong engineers with deep experience in comparable languages are welcome.
• Strong foundational software engineering skills: Solid grasp of computer science fundamentals such as data structures, concurrency, time/space complexity and performance.
• Systems-level thinking: Able to reason about distributed systems under failure, scale, and load and design resilient abstractions accordingly.
• Familiar with networks, operating systems, compilers, storage systems, or distributed services.
• Infrastructure as Code and automation: Experience with tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent for managing cloud-native infrastructure declaratively and repeatably.
• Deep operational experience with PostgreSQL in production — including performance tuning, schema evolution, multi-tenant design, and reliability under load.
• Security-first mindset: Deep appreciation for secure-by-default design. Familiar with principles like least privilege, secrets management, threat modeling, and how to embed security controls into infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Comfortable partnering with other engineers, product managers, sales, marketing, IT and support to define and implement platform capabilities that meet shared goals.
• AI assisted development: Excited about using AI-assisted development tools and interested in integrating AI into engineering workflows and platform capabilities.

What we offer

• Work alongside a high-calibre team with strong engineering standards and real ownership.
• Full access to modern AI-assisted engineering tools and freedom to experiment.
• Competitive salary and share option plan.
• 25 days annual leave, plus public holidays.
• Excellent pension scheme, company contribution fixed at 7.5%.
• Private healthcare, including family cover and pre-existing conditions.
• Flexible hybrid working with 2 days per fortnight in our Chancery Lane office.
• Regular social events and offsites.
• Access to a gym and fitness classes in our office building.