Lead Platform Engineer in Liverpool

As our Lead Platform Engineer, you’ll play a crucial role in shaping the future of our engineering platform. You’ll set the standards, define the strategy, and lead the delivery of a secure, scalable, and developer‑friendly ecosystem that empowers product teams to ship faster and more confidently via our internal developer portal.

You’ll act as both a hands‑on technical authority and a mentor, driving modern engineering practices, championing platform excellence, and ensuring our infrastructure evolves in line with a growing and ambitious business. This is a hybrid role with occasional onsite collaboration — typically once every 2–3 months, but you are able to attend our offices as much as you like, — at either our Liverpool or Welwyn Garden City offices. From time to time, you may also travel between sites.

• Shape and evolve the core of our platform — leading the design, build, and continuous improvement of essential infrastructure such as AKS clusters, networking, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, API gateways, and the internal developer portal’s self‑service capabilities.
• Set the standards that teams rely on, defining and enforcing engineering best practices that ensure consistency, scalability, and operational excellence across the organisation.
• Drive strategies for critical non‑functional areas — including security, reliability, performance, and cost optimisation — ensuring the platform meets the demands of a modern, growing business.
• Work hand‑in‑hand with product and engineering leaders to influence architecture decisions and align platform capabilities with both technical and business goals.
• Elevate the developer experience by championing automation, great documentation, intuitive self‑service, and a platform that removes friction from delivery.
• Oversee and improve incident management, leading root‑cause analysis, implementing preventative measures, and fostering a culture of resilience.
• Mentor and empower a high‑performing team, providing technical guidance, coaching, and an environment where platform engineers can thrive.
• Embed DevSecOps principles into everything we do, ensuring security, monitoring, compliance, and automation are built in from the start.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies, helping shape our long‑term platform strategy and ensuring we invest in the right tools, patterns, and practices.
• Collaborate across the organisation to drive adoption, influence engineering behaviours, and ensure the platform delivers measurable impact.

• A strong technical foundation, whether through a Computer Science/IT degree or equivalent hands‑on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure and automation at scale.
• Proven experience leading platform or infrastructure teams within a cloud-native environment.
• Deep technical expertise in containerisation (Kubernetes, AKS) and cloud architecture (Azure preferred).
• Demonstrated success in evolving CI/CD practices and automation pipelines that enable developer productivity and operational reliability.
• Strong understanding of network, container, and infrastructure security best practices.
• Experience administering and optimising Linux-based systems.
• Strategic thinking with the ability to balance long-term vision and short-term deliverables.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills with a track record of influencing at multiple levels (technical and business).
• Experience driving a culture of reliability, performance, and continuous improvement.

• Hands-on experience with Kustomize, Helm, Port.io.
• Experience with Azure DevOps or similar CI/CD tooling.
• Proficiency in Bash, PowerShell, or Python scripting.
• Knowledge of tools for validating Kubernetes YAML and configuration quality.
• Certification in Kubernetes, Azure, or cloud architecture.
• Experience designing and operating highly available and distributed systems.

• Holiday purchase scheme, with 25 days holiday plus bank holidays as standard.
• On-site gym at our office (Free), and nationwide corporate rate gym membership.
• Online benefits portal where you can access lots of deals, discounts - for example of shopping or holidays.
• Contributory company pension scheme.
• Progression and Development.
• Private medical insurance.
• Electric Car Scheme.
• Life assurance of 3 x annual gross salary, with the option to purchase additional cover.
• You’re also able to purchase a range of benefits at a discounted rate including, critical illness cover, bicycles via our Cycle2Work scheme, dental insurance and TasteCard dining discount card.
• Love2shop Everyday Benefits Card.

As a disability-confident committed company, we have a passion for championing equality. We welcome all colleagues into a work environment where success is attainable for everyone, regardless of disability, age, race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation. We are committed to ensuring that everyone has equal access to growth and opportunities in our workplace.