Platform Engineering Lead in Newcastle upon Tyne

Join our Development Team as a Platform Engineering Lead!

We are Cintra. Known for our award-winning software that delivers payroll solutions to over 1000 clients. If you're passionate about payroll and are eager to join a dynamic team of seasoned professionals, this is the opportunity for you.

As the proud recipient of the Payroll Service Provider of the Year 2025 award at the CIPP Annual Excellence Awards, we offer exciting opportunities for professional development, competitive bonus structures, and a collaborative work environment.

Our modern offices are located in Hoults Yard, nestled on the outskirts of the vibrant Ouseburn Valley. This area boasts a thriving creative community, rich local heritage, and a lively social scene.

We are looking for a senior, hands-on Platform / DevOps engineer to take technical ownership of the production infrastructure supporting our SaaS products.

This is primarily a technical ownership role rather than a people-management role. The successful candidate will consolidate responsibilities currently distributed across several development teams and establish consistent standards for infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, security, recovery and production support.

Core Technical Skills

Essential / strong experience:

· Cloud: Strong hands-on AWS experience. Ideally also Azure and/or GCP with the ability to own a multi-cloud estate.

· Infrastructure as Code: Terraform essential, including modules, state management, standards and controlled infrastructure changes.

· CI/CD: Building and maintaining automated deployment pipelines; experience with tools such as CircleCI, Azure Pipelines or equivalent.

· Cloud networking: VPC/VNET, routing, DNS, load balancers, firewalls, security groups and connectivity.

· Databases: Operational experience with SQL Server/Azure SQL, PostgreSQL/Aurora and/or MySQL availability, security, backup and recovery rather than application query development.

· Monitoring & observability: Datadog, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring or equivalent; proactive alerting and production health monitoring.

· Identity & access: SSO, cloud IAM, privileged/JIT access, service accounts and secrets management.

· Security: Cloud hardening, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, certificates and secure production access.

· Backup & DR: Backup strategy, restore testing, failover, RTO/RPO and disaster-recovery planning.

· Production operations: Strong incident-management skills, root-cause analysis, runbooks and P1 production support.

Useful Experience

· AWS ECS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Aurora, DynamoDB and Cognito.

· Azure App Services, Azure SQL and Azure Storage.

· GCP App Engine, Cloud SQL, Datastore and Cloud Storage.

· Windows Server, RDP/RDWeb and mixed Windows/Linux estates.

· Ansible or other configuration-management tooling.

· Rollbar and application/infrastructure logging.

· Cloud cost optimisation and capacity management.

At Cintra we know our colleagues are our biggest asset and an investment in them is an investment into the company. We offer:

We go the extra mile to strategically invest in our employees by providing them with invaluable learning opportunities to propel their careers forward. Our commitment to continuous employee training ensures that knowledge remains up-to-date, skills stay sharp, and confidence continues to grow. We firmly believe in empowering our workforce with the tools they need to thrive and succeed.

Further details of the role can be found linked in the Job Description. Please note that we do not accept unsolicited CVs from agencies for this position, we thank you for your cooperation. We reserve the right to close this job advert at anytime should there be a high volume of applications.