Staff Platform Engineer

Responsibilities

• Establish a coherent 12–18 month technical direction for the platform, including trade-offs, milestones, and alignment across engineering leadership.
• Drive broad adoption of platform capabilities through thoughtful design, documentation, and reduced friction for provisioning and deployment.
• Define architectural patterns and standards that enable autonomous and AI-augmented workflows across the organisation.
• Establish platform standards for security, reliability, and operational excellence that teams adopt through ease of use rather than gatekeeping.
• Reduce misconfiguration, security exceptions, operational incidents, and platform bottlenecks across the engineering estate.
• Serve as a technical authority and strengthen senior engineers through technical challenge, feedback, and exposure to complex problems.
• Make high-judgement decisions on foundational trade-offs such as build versus buy, depth versus breadth, and short-term pragmatism versus long-term coherence.
• Navigate disagreement among senior engineers, architects, and stakeholders to reach durable technical decisions.
• Design systems, standards, and enablement approaches that multiply the effectiveness of engineers across multiple teams.
• Define how AI and automation are embedded into the platform at an architectural level.
• Shape the platform roadmap using internal-customer feedback, usage data, and analysis of self-service friction.
• Identify architectural, security, and operational risks before they become incidents.
• Connect platform decisions to business outcomes and communicate platform strategy to senior leadership.
• Develop senior engineers and model the organisation's engineering culture.

Requirements

• Experience defining architecture, standards, and patterns for a platform domain over a multi-quarter horizon.
• Experience making and communicating foundational technical trade-offs.
• Experience influencing senior engineers, architects, stakeholders, and teams without directly delivering every initiative.
• Experience embedding AI and automation into platform architecture and engineering workflows.
• Understanding of platform adoption dynamics, internal customer needs, and barriers to self-service.
• Ability to identify and influence security, reliability, operational, and cost-efficiency risks across an engineering organisation.
• Ability to translate engineering constraints and platform strategy into clear business language.
• Experience developing senior engineers through technical challenge and feedback.

Compensation and Benefits

• Equity offered across all roles.
• £5,000 training and conference budget for individual and group development.
• 25 days of holiday plus 8 bank holidays (33 days total).
• Company pension scheme via Penfold.
• Mental health support and therapy via Spectrum.life.
• Individual wellbeing allowance via Juno.
• Private healthcare insurance through AXA.
• Income protection.