Principal Platform Engineer in Wakefield

We are looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to join our Platform Engineering function. This is a senior, hands‑on engineering role focused on the platforms, tooling, and infrastructure that our development teams rely on every day. The role will own and improve key services across source control, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, automation, backups, and internal development tooling. This is not a dedicated game Build Engineer role. The role owns and improves the shared platforms that enable builds and releases, while helping to define clearer ownership between IT / Platform Engineering and development teams. Project‑specific build and release activity should sit closer to the development teams, with Platform Engineering providing the secure, reliable, and scalable foundation. The successful candidate will work closely with engineering, IT, and studio teams to improve reliability, reduce manual effort, remove bottlenecks, and support the evolution of our development infrastructure from on‑premises to more resilient cloud‑based models.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Platform & Infrastructure
• Administer, maintain, and evolve our Perforce SCM environment across multiple projects, covering access control, capacity planning, resilience, replication, and recovery.
• Support the ongoing improvement of source control services used by internal teams and external development partners.
• Design, build, and maintain development infrastructure across on‑premises virtualisation and AWS cloud platforms.
• Support the migration and evolution of selected services from on‑premises infrastructure to AWS, including architecture, planning, testing, and cutover.
• Implement and maintain backup, recovery, and resilience processes for key development platforms.
• Manage and improve internal platform services such as package management, build infrastructure, monitoring, and supporting tools.
• CI/CD & Automation
• Own and improve the shared TeamCity/CI/CD platform, ensuring it is reliable, secure, scalable, and easier for development teams to use safely.
• Define standards and guardrails for build pipelines and agent requirements.
• Help move day‑to‑day project‑specific build ownership closer to development teams while ensuring the underlying platform remains stable and controlled.
• Identify and implement automation to reduce manual effort and improve developer productivity.
• Configure and maintain Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform, Packer, and Ansible.
• Improve repeatability, documentation, and auditability across platform and infrastructure changes.
• Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using tools such as Datadog or similar platforms.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across infrastructure, source control, CI/CD, cloud services, and platform tooling.
• Support incident response and root‑cause analysis for critical platform services.
• Improve operational documentation, support handover, and service ownership across the team.
• Handle escalated support requests relating to platform services, while reducing repeated manual intervention through automation and process improvement.
• Act as a senior technical authority for platform engineering services.
• Lead larger platform improvement projects from design through to delivery.
• Work with the IT Director, Head of IT / Platform Engineering, development teams, and studio stakeholders to align technical plans with business priorities.
• Mentor and guide junior and mid‑level engineers.
• Help define clear ownership boundaries between Platform Engineering, IT Operations, development teams, and build/release ownership.
• Define and promote best practices for source control, CI/CD, platform operations, automation, and release‑enabling processes.

What You’ll Need

• Strong experience administering and supporting Perforce SCM in a production development environment.
• Designing, maintaining, or improving CI/CD platforms, ideally including TeamCity.
• Strong infrastructure experience across Windows and Linux environments.
• Hands‑on experience with virtualisation technologies such as VMware, vSphere, Hyper‑V, or similar.
• Good working knowledge of AWS services, particularly compute, storage, networking, and infrastructure design.
• Scripting and automation using languages such as Python, PowerShell, or Bash.
• Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Packer, Ansible, or similar.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, pipelines, source control, and platform services.
• Experience improving reliability, resilience, monitoring, and recovery of critical systems.
• Ability to work with development teams and translate platform issues into practical improvements.
• Proven technical leadership, including mentoring others and coordinating work across teams.
• Experience migrating development services from on‑premises infrastructure to AWS or another cloud platform.
• Package management platforms such as Nexus or Artifactory.
• Monitoring and observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• Docker, Kubernetes, or container‑based infrastructure.
• SRE principles and their application to platform reliability.
• Building internal tools or frameworks to improve developer productivity.
• Supporting game development, software development, or creative production environments.