Platform Engineer in Send

Location: Crawley, United Kingdom

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.

Thales is continuing to develop its digital platform capabilities, and this role will play an important part in supporting and evolving a dedicated AI platform capability within the UK Digital Competence Centre (Best-In-Class). As an Infrastructure Systems Engineer, you will join an agile platform team responsible for supporting secure, resilient and high-performing on-premise infrastructure services that underpin a business-critical hosted AI solution. You will help maintain and improve the core infrastructure environment, ensuring services remain available, supportable and secure for internal users and engineering teams. This is a varied role with a strong operational focus, covering infrastructure support, systems administration, troubleshooting, lifecycle management and service improvement across a mixed technology estate. You will work closely with platform engineers, developers, security specialists and other stakeholders to support reliable service delivery and continuous improvement.

Your career could develop within the DCC as it continues to grow or take you into the wider business as our digital and technical agenda evolves. Thales is a great place to work where diversity, integrity and a passion for what we do are very important to us. Whether you have worked with platform infrastructure for many years, or have gained relevant experience more recently and are looking to build on it, we would love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Support and maintain the infrastructure underpinning an on-premise hosted AI platform, ensuring services remain secure, reliable and available.
• Monitor platform health and performance, investigating and resolving issues as part of day-to-day service support.
• Carry out routine maintenance and lifecycle activities, including patching, upgrades and scale-out activities.
• Work with engineering, security and service teams to support a resilient, supportable and well-governed platform.
• Contribute to technical documentation, operational standards and continuous improvement activities.

Infrastructure and platform support

• Support the day-to-day operation of the hosted platform across physical server, the virtualisation layer and operating system environments.
• Help maintain service availability, performance and capacity through monitoring, troubleshooting and proactive maintenance.
• Support containerised services and the underlying infrastructure they rely on.

Maintenance and lifecycle management

• Carry out routine maintenance activities including patching, upgrades and health checks.
• Support the ongoing management of hardware and software lifecycles to keep services secure and supportable.
• Maintain clear technical documentation and operational records.

Incident resolution and service improvement

• Investigate and resolve infrastructure and platform issues in line with agreed support processes.
• Work with internal teams and, where necessary, suppliers to restore service and address recurring problems.
• Identify opportunities to improve reliability, supportability and efficiency across the platform.

Experience Required

We recruit for roles at many levels so we would be very interested to hear from you regardless of your length of experience.

• Experience working with Windows Server operating systems
• Experience with Unix-based operating systems, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Experience with VMware ESXi and/or other hypervisors
• Experience supporting containerised environments, particularly Kubernetes
• Incident and problem management, troubleshooting and working within change management procedures
• Good understanding of core networking principles
• Ability to demonstrate a good understanding of application and operating system lifecycle management
• Experience supporting infrastructure in an enterprise or operational environment
• Good understanding of platform and infrastructure support principles

Desirable Skills

• Experience with build and CI/CD tools and pipeline (BitBucket/ Github)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or Ansible
• Active ability and interest in scripting languages
• HP Enterprise hardware
• Agile working methodologies
• Active Directory
• PowerBI
• Solid understanding of APIs and their function

Security Clearance Requirement: Due to the nature of the work that we do at Thales, many of our roles are subject to security restrictions. This role requires Security Clearance (SC). It would be advantageous if currently held, however, if not currently held, it is a requirement that the successful applicant undergo, achieve, and maintain SC Clearance prior to commencing employment. To be eligible for full SC, you generally need to have resided in the UK for the last 5 years. In some circumstances, a minimum of 3 years’ residence in the UK over the last 5 years may be accepted, with additional overseas checks.

At Thales, we ensure equal opportunities, pay and working conditions for all. The benefits we offer include private medical insurance, buying or selling annual leave, cycle to work schemes, employee discounts, paid volunteering day, stocks and shares, annual bonus and much more depending on the role.

We are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued for who they are and the unique strengths they bring.