Senior Platform Engineer (GCP) in Birmingham

At Kainos, we’re problem solvers, innovators, and collaborators - driven by a shared mission to create real impact. We believe in a people-first culture, where your ideas are valued, your growth is supported, and your contributions truly make a difference. Here, you’ll be part of a diverse, ambitious team that celebrates creativity and collaboration. Ready to make your mark? Join us and be part of something bigger.

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE BUSINESS

As a Senior Platform Engineer - GCP (Senior Associate) in Kainos, you’ll be responsible for leading with the design of significant components of a modern digital service platform including its automation, build, deployment and support. It’s a fast-paced environment and you’ll be trusted to make sound, reasoned decisions. You’ll do this whilst learning about new technologies and approaches, with talented colleagues that will help you to learn, develop and grow.

Your Key Responsibilities Will Include:

• Working as part of a team - You’ll work alongside colleagues in engineering, testing, consulting, product management and security capabilities to build, test and deploy software of the highest quality.
• Using technology for positive impact – You’ll ensure the latest technologies are employed appropriately to extract maximum user and business benefit. You’ll ensure alignment to industry standards and best practices.
• Putting people first - you’ll support your colleagues and facilitate an inclusive DevOps culture in all that you do.
• Finding your voice – As a respected voice within your team and to our customers, you’ll drive conversations and decisions to ensure services are scalable, secure, reliable and performant.
• Supporting services through Live Operation – Getting services into production is just the beginning with the fun truly starting when real users start interacting with the service you’ve built. You’ll make sure the service is available, secure and performant as you strive to continuously improve it.
• Becoming a Role Model – You’ll embody the Kainos values and be the person people look up to. You’ll proactively coach and mentor more junior members of the team.
• Pushing the boundaries – Through exposure to technology you may develop specialisms and choose to pivot your career in a certain direction.

Minimum (essential) Requirements:

• A proven ability of strong team skills, including working in a multi‑disciplinary team is crucial.
• Good verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate issues to other technical people, and sometimes to non‑technical people.
• Significant expertise in: use of multiple configuration management, infrastructure provisioning and automation tools.
• Fluency in at least one of the following: Powershell, Bash, Python, Ruby, Go, Groovy.
• Expertise in using multiple automation tools and at least one of: Powershell, Bash, Python, Ruby, Go, Groovy.
• Demonstrable experience in: designing, building, testing, automating, monitoring and supporting significant components within a modern digital service platform in production environments.
• Producing designs that are scalable, resilient, efficient, secure, cost‑effective and minimise lock‑in.
• Contributing to technical decisions and direction in a collaborative team environment, including architecture, estimation, product planning, user story/requirement creation and advocating MVP.
• Implementing modern Continuous Delivery processes for releasing software to production.
• Applying industry best practices and patterns across infrastructure and application components e.g. security, elasticity, performance.
• Using public cloud platform(s) to solve business problems (GCP).
• Applying configuration management, infrastructure provisioning and container orchestration tooling to solve business problems.
• Using modern version control systems including git.
• Debugging complex problems across multiple servers, services and tools.
• Active SC Clearance or Eligible required.

DESIRABLE:

• Third level – or equivalent - qualification in a related discipline.
• Obtained mid-level certification with a public cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Active participation in knowledge sharing activities, both within the team and with wider non‑technical audiences.
• Experience of cloud‑native SaaS and PaaS technologies.
• Experience in managing, mentoring and coaching junior members of staff.

Embracing our differences:

At Kainos, we believe in the power of diversity, equity and inclusion. We are committed to building a team that is as diverse as the world we live in, where everyone is valued, respected, and given an equal chance to thrive. We actively seek out talented people from all backgrounds, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or any other characteristic that makes them who they are. We also believe every candidate deserves a level playing field. Our friendly talent acquisition team is here to support you every step of the way, so if you require any accommodations or adjustments, we encourage you to reach out. We understand that everyone's journey is different, and by having a private conversation we can ensure that our recruitment process is tailored to your needs.