At a Glance
- Tasks: Shape and evolve cloud platforms across GCP and AWS, driving innovation and operational excellence.
- Company: Join ISS STOXX, a leader in capital market technology solutions with a diverse and inclusive culture.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, career growth opportunities, and a collaborative work environment.
- Other info: Dynamic team environment focused on continuous learning and technical excellence.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by enabling AI transformation and developing cutting-edge platform capabilities.
- Qualifications: 10+ years in platform engineering with expertise in cloud-native technologies and automation.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
ISS STOXX is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to join our global Platform Engineering function, responsible for the cloud platforms, engineering capabilities, and operational foundations that support our products and services worldwide. Working across both GCP and AWS, you will help shape the next evolution of our platform engineering capability. A key focus of the role will be extending and maturing our multi-cloud platform strategy, including the development of AWS landing zone capabilities that align with the standards, automation, governance, and developer experience established within our GCP platform. Alongside this, you will play an important role in enabling the organisation's AI transformation.
Building on our existing cloud platform foundations, you will help develop the tooling, patterns, operational capabilities, and platform services required to support AI-powered applications, agentic workflows, and emerging AI technologies at enterprise scale. As a Principal Engineer, you will work closely with peers across engineering, architecture, security, and product teams to solve complex technical challenges and influence technical direction through expertise, collaboration, and delivery. You will evaluate emerging technologies, develop proof-of-concepts, and help translate promising ideas into practical, reusable capabilities that add value across the business.
We're looking for someone who combines deep platform engineering expertise with strong technical judgement, creativity, and curiosity. You should be equally comfortable designing cloud platforms, improving engineering practices, automating complex processes, and exploring how emerging technologies can be applied to solve real business problems. You will thrive in a collaborative environment where success is achieved through influence rather than hierarchy, where platform engineering is viewed as an enabler for product teams, and where balancing innovation with operational excellence is fundamental to long-term success.
Responsibilities:
- Shape the architecture, evolution, and operational excellence of ISS STOXX's global cloud platforms across GCP and AWS, ensuring they remain secure, scalable, resilient, and easy for engineering teams to consume.
- Design, build, and mature AWS landing zone capabilities that align with the standards, governance, automation, security controls, and developer experience established with our GCP platform.
- Develop and enhance platform services, self-service capabilities, CI/CD tooling, observability solutions, and automation frameworks that improve developer productivity and operational effectiveness.
- Contribute to our AI transformation by building the platform capabilities, tooling, operational patterns, and guardrails required to support AI-powered applications, agentic workflows, and emerging AI technologies at enterprise scale.
- Act as a technical authority for complex platform engineering challenges, providing hands-on leadership during critical incidents and guiding the resolution of high-impact technical problems.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, develop proof-of-concepts, and translate successful innovations into practical, reusable platform capabilities that deliver measurable business value.
- Partner with engineering, architecture, security, and product teams to define technical direction, establish engineering standards, and ensure platform capabilities meet current and future business requirements.
- Drive continuous improvement across platform reliability, observability, automation, security, cost efficiency, and developer experience through data-driven engineering practices.
- Mentor and support engineers across the organisation, promoting platform engineering best practices, technical excellence, and a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.
- Contribute to the long-term evolution of the Platform and AI Engineering functions, helping balance operational excellence with innovation while enabling teams to deliver value quickly and safely.
Requirements:
- At least 10 years' experience in platform engineering, cloud engineering, or related disciplines, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale enterprise platforms.
- Strong experience designing and implementing cloud-native platforms and engineering capabilities on GCP and/or AWS.
- Experience building or maturing cloud landing zones, platform governance frameworks, and self-service developer platforms.
- Deep understanding of modern cloud architectures, including containers, Kubernetes, serverless technologies, APIs, networking, security, and identity management.
- Strong hands-on expertise with Infrastructure as Code, with master proficiency in Terraform.
- Experience developing and operating large-scale CI/CD, automation, and platform engineering capabilities that improve developer productivity and operational excellence.
- Experience evaluating emerging technologies, developing proof-of-concepts, and translating successful concepts into production-ready platform capabilities.
- Practical experience enabling AI and data-driven workloads on cloud platforms, including familiarity with the tooling, operational considerations, and governance requirements associated with modern AI solutions.
- Strong software engineering and automation skills, with expertise in Python and experience building reusable tooling and platform services.
- Experience with modern platform and engineering tooling such as GitHub Actions, Apigee, Airflow, and related cloud-native technologies.
- Expertise with observability platforms such as Data Dog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk or equivalent, including monitoring, logging, tracing, reliability engineering, and incident management.
- Sound technical judgement with the ability to balance innovation, risk, operational excellence, and business outcomes.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction, build consensus, and drive adoption of engineering best practices across multiple teams.
- Experience coaching and mentoring engineers, fostering technical excellence, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Experience working effectively within global, distributed, or multinational engineering organisations.
- Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A pragmatic, outcome-focused approach with a passion for simplicity, automation, observability, and continuous improvement.
- Willingness to participate in out-of-hours support and major incident escalation when required.
Nice to have:
- Experience building platforms that support AI-powered applications, machine learning workloads, or agentic systems.
- Experience with GCP AI services, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model operations, or AI governance frameworks.
- Experience operating in multi-cloud environments and helping organisations establish consistent platform standards across cloud providers.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Principal Platform Engineer in London employer: Qontigo
At ISS STOXX, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that fosters a collaborative and innovative work culture. As a Principal Platform Engineer in London, you will have the opportunity to shape cutting-edge cloud platforms while contributing to our AI transformation, all within a diverse team that values your expertise and encourages continuous learning. With a commitment to employee growth and a focus on operational excellence, we empower our engineers to drive meaningful impact in the capital markets sector.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Principal Platform Engineer in London
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at Qontigo or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to Qontigo.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like Qontigo.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like Qontigo that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Principal Platform Engineer in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Qontigo.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Qontigo and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at Qontigo
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Qontigo uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
