Senior Platform Engineer (Azure)

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will lead the design, evolution, and reliability of the core platform that underpins our engineering ecosystem. You will set technical direction, define standards, and drive best practices that enable product teams to deliver securely, efficiently, and at scale. Your role goes beyond implementation; you will shape the platform strategy, influence architectural decisions, and act as a technical leader across teams. 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 Welwyn Garden City or Liverpool offices. From time to time, you may also travel between sites.

Key responsibilities

• Owning and evolving the core platform infrastructure (e.g. AKS clusters, networking, API gateways), ensuring scalability, resilience, and operational excellence.
• Defining and enforcing platform standards, guardrails, and best practices across areas such as security, cost optimisation, reliability, and performance.
• Driving platform strategy and roadmap in collaboration with engineering leadership, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives.
• Partnering with product and engineering teams to understand pain points, proactively identify opportunities, and prioritise high-impact platform improvements.
• Leading architecture and design discussions, providing expert guidance on cloud-native patterns, distributed systems, and platform capabilities.
• Designing, implementing, and continuously improving CI/CD and GitOps workflows to enable safe, fast, and repeatable delivery.
• Championing DevSecOps principles, embedding security and compliance into the software delivery lifecycle.
• Establishing and improving observability, monitoring, and incident response practices, including vulnerability management and remediation.
• Mentoring engineers and contributing to a strong engineering culture through knowledge sharing, documentation, and technical leadership.
• Evaluating and introducing new tools, technologies, and approaches to keep the platform modern, efficient, and competitive.

What we would like from you

• Strong experience in platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps within a distributed cloud environment.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and containerised workloads, ideally in managed environments such as AKS.
• Proven experience designing and operating scalable, highly available cloud infrastructure.
• Strong background in CI/CD, automation, and GitOps practices, including building and evolving pipelines at scale.
• Solid understanding of cloud networking, identity, and security principles, including container and Kubernetes security.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management.
• Strong Linux systems administration knowledge.
• Demonstrated ability to make pragmatic, risk-based decisions that balance business priorities with technical excellence.
• Experience shaping standards, influencing teams, and driving adoption of platform practices.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

It would be great if you have the following

• Experience with Helm, Kustomize, and Kubernetes ecosystem tooling.
• Familiarity with Azure and Azure DevOps.
• Experience with observability platforms and Kubernetes policy enforcement tools.
• Proficiency in scripting or programming (e.g. Bash, Python, PowerShell, C#).
• Experience designing multi-region or highly available systems.
• Relevant certifications in Kubernetes, Azure, or cloud-native technologies.

Our benefits if you decide to join us:

• 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.