Senior Platform Engineer in Manchester

The Senior Platform Engineer is a senior technical contributor and leader within the platform engineering team, responsible for driving the delivery of complex, high-impact infrastructure and platform initiatives within the vision and strategy set by the Head of Platform. You will take ownership of technical delivery across projects, mentor and coach engineers, enforce standards, and provide guidance on the most challenging technical problems. This role is both hands-on and leadership-focused: you will build, automate, and optimise platforms while also coordinating work across engineers to ensure quality, reliability, and security at scale. Success requires deep technical expertise, the ability to lead through influence, and a mindset of continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure & Cloud: Design, implement, and lead delivery of complex infrastructure solutions in Azure and Kubernetes (AKS). Define and evolve reusable patterns for infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Crossplane) and enforce governance. Ensure scalability, high availability, security, and disaster recovery are considered in all builds. Lead complex migrations (e.g. AKS upgrades, network segmentation) with minimal disruption. Build, enhance, and scale internal developer platforms and tooling to increase delivery speed and safety. Establish and maintain golden paths, reusable templates, and developer onboarding experiences. Drive adoption of platform products by partnering with product engineering and QA.
• CI/CD & Automation: Architect and optimise CI/CD pipelines for multiple teams and services. Implement advanced release strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags) and enforce security and compliance checks. Define reusable pipeline frameworks and templates for org-wide adoption. Lead initiatives to eliminate bottlenecks and systemic inefficiencies in build/test/deploy processes.
• Security & Compliance: Integrate security and compliance into platform workflows (identity, RBAC, secrets, supply chain security). Define and enforce secure‑by‑default patterns for infrastructure and pipelines. Partner with IT/InfoSec to embed compliance evidence automation into platforms.
• Observability & Reliability: Define and implement observability strategies (SLOs, metrics, tracing, error budgets) at team and multi‑team scope. Lead root cause analysis for incidents and ensure learnings are applied. Drive SRE practices into daily engineering, improving MTTR and resilience. Promote and lead game days, chaos testing, and proactive reliability improvements. Mentor and coach junior and mid‑level engineers, raising the technical bar through example. Lead technical reviews, ensuring quality, maintainability, and alignment to best practices. Provide guidance in resolving conflicts and aligning technical direction across multiple teams. Share knowledge through workshops, documentation, and training sessions.

Success Measures

• Lead the delivery of high‑impact initiatives that raise reliability, security, and developer productivity.
• Mentor and coach engineers, building future technical leaders within the team.
• Establish platform standards, patterns, and golden paths that scale across the organisation.
• Position yourself for progression into Staff or Principal roles with greater organisational scope.

Values & Behaviours

• Mentorship & Coaching: Actively supports the growth of mid‑level and junior engineers by providing structured feedback, pairing sessions, and development plans.
• Delivery Leadership: Leads the execution of multi‑service initiatives, coordinating dependencies, sequencing risk/value, and ensuring timely, reliable delivery.
• Ownership: Takes end‑to‑end responsibility for delivering solutions to complex technical challenges and proactively unblocks others.
• Standards & Quality: Defines and enforces high standards in code, testing, CI/CD, observability, and security. Ensures team deliverables meet long‑term maintainability goals.
• Resilience Under Pressure: Leads incident response and post‑incident reviews calmly, ensuring robust fixes and systemic improvements.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively drives optimisation and automation across platforms and processes, improving developer productivity and reducing toil.
• Collaboration & Communication: Communicates clearly with developers, stakeholders, and leadership. Influences technical decisions across teams with credibility and clarity.

Training & Enablement

You will receive structured onboarding (products, customers, systems) and systems training.

Skills & Experience

• Proven track record delivering complex technical projects in cloud‑native environments.
• Strong skills in Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform, Crossplane) with governance and testing.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and operational best practices.
• Expertise in CI/CD tooling (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) including advanced release strategies.
• Knowledge of observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, LGTM) and SLO implementation.
• Strong background in security practices: secrets management, RBAC, supply chain security.
• Programming proficiency in Golang, with additional scripting experience (Python, Bash).
• Solid Linux and Windows administration experience, including troubleshooting and performance tuning.
• Prior experience as a technical lead or senior engineer on multi‑person projects.
• Experience implementing observability and reliability improvements at scale.
• Knowledge of telecommunications protocols (WebRTC, RTP, SIP) is a plus.
• Familiarity with cost optimisation and FinOps practices in cloud environments.

Benefits and Perks

• 25 days annual leave plus your birthday off.
• Increased holiday entitlement with length of service.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity packages.
• Life insurance.
• Enhanced pension options.
• Company‑paid sick leave.
• Personal training allowance.
• Buy and sell holiday options.
• Social, charity and culture committee events.
• Hybrid working (minimum two days in the office).