Senior Platform Engineer in Birmingham

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will be a technically strong individual contributor and emerging leader within our platform engineering team. You will own complex workstreams end-to-end, lead the technical design of platform capabilities, and actively raise the bar for reliability, security, and developer experience across our multi‑tenant automotive SaaS platform. You will be a trusted go‑to for your peers, able to investigate and resolve challenging production issues, contribute to architectural decisions, and help grow the team's capabilities. You play a key role in shaping how we leverage AI‑driven automation, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and agentic workflows to build self‑healing, intelligent platform capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure & Automation
  • Own and lead complex Terraform workstreams, including designing reusable module structures, managing remote state, and reviewing infrastructure changes for correctness and security.
  • Design and implement GitOps patterns using ArgoCD, ensuring declarative, auditable deployments across multi‑tenant AKS clusters.
  • Build automation (Python, Bash, Go) to eliminate manual toil, improve reliability, and support product engineering teams with robust platform tooling.
  • Drive CI/CD improvements including pipeline architecture, caching strategies, image build optimisation, and GitLab CI pipeline templates for consistency across teams.
  • Contribute to architectural decisions on platform components – providing input on build vs buy, trade‑offs, and long‑term maintainability.
• Security & Compliance
  • Lead security‑by‑design across the infrastructure lifecycle, including hardening AKS clusters, managing RBAC, enforcing pod security standards, and configuring network segmentation.
  • Own DevSecOps practices including container image scanning (Trivy/Snyk), SBOM generation, supply chain security, and integration with CI/CD pipelines.
  • Drive vulnerability remediation – triaging findings, implementing fixes, and coordinating pen test remediation with thoroughness and urgency.
  • Contribute to and maintain security documentation, runbooks, and control evidence required for compliance and audit purposes.
• Reliability & Observability
  • Own significant components of our observability stack – Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and distributed tracing – building dashboards, alert rules, and runbooks that support the team during incidents.
  • Lead or co‑lead incident response for complex production issues, including investigation, communication, and post‑incident review facilitation.
  • Proactively identify reliability risks – surfacing issues before they become incidents and driving preventative improvements to platform architecture.
  • Establish and refine SLOs and SLIs for platform components, ensuring the team has meaningful signals to measure and improve platform health.

About You

• Strong hands‑on experience with Kubernetes and Azure services (AKS, Azure AD, Key Vault, Azure Monitor) – able to troubleshoot complex cluster issues independently.
• Deep Terraform proficiency – module authoring, remote state, workspace management, and reviewing others' IaC changes.
• Confident in scripting and programming – Python, Bash required; Go or TypeScript a strong plus.
• Extensive CI/CD experience with GitLab CI, ArgoCD, or Azure DevOps – including building pipeline templates and debugging complex failures.
• Strong security knowledge for cloud‑native environments – container hardening, secrets management, RBAC, network policies, and supply chain security.
• Proven ability to lead workstreams – from scoping through to delivery and documentation – with clear communication throughout.
• Skilled at explaining complex technical concepts to both technical peers and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Experience with AI/ML tooling and emerging patterns including LLMs, prompt engineering, AI‑assisted development, or MCP integrations.
• Observability platform depth – experience owning Grafana/Prometheus/Loki implementations and defining alerting strategies at scale.
• Security scanning and DevSecOps tooling (Snyk, Trivy, Microsoft Defender for Containers) with experience in policy‑as‑code approaches.
• Microservices and multi‑tenant SaaS experience – understanding the cross‑cutting concerns of platform reliability in complex environments.
• Helm and Kubernetes operators – authoring or maintaining charts for production workloads.

Personal Attributes

• A self‑starter who identifies problems and acts on them without needing to be asked.
• Technically curious – especially about AI‑driven platform capabilities, emerging tooling, and better ways of working.
• Security‑conscious – treats security as a first‑class concern, not an afterthought.
• Generous with knowledge – writes things down, mentors peers, and makes the team better by sharing what they know.
• Resilient under pressure – calm and methodical during incidents, with a focus on resolution and learning.
• Comfortable with ambiguity – able to navigate complex problems, make pragmatic decisions, and communicate clearly when things are uncertain.