Platform Engineer

Department: Technology / Engineering

Reporting to: Platform Engineering Tech Lead / Manager

Location: Hybrid - Office travel on average once per month, London Waterloo

Also participate in an on-call rota, covering one week every six weeks

Why this role exists

FairPlay Sports Media is building a tech-led, AI and data-powered sports media network that serves both owned brands (e.g., oddschecker, WhoScored.com, SuperScommesse, and others) and partners with BetTech products spanning data, display, and predictive capabilities. At FairPlay scale - real-time data, high-frequency updates, and partner integrations - the Platform team provides the infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and observability that let multiple engineering teams ship and operate reliable, compliant, high-throughput products.

Our busiest moments - major sporting events, new market launches, and B2B partner go-lives - are when the platform matters most, and the Platform team makes sure the foundations hold.

What you’ll do

We are looking for a hands-on, pragmatic Platform Engineer (DevOps / Infrastructure) to own and deliver components within our Google Cloud Platform estate - across CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and Kubernetes-based workloads.

You’ll take part in the on-call rotation, automate away operational toil, apply secure-by-default practices to everything you build, and support product development squads with the environments, pipelines, and tooling they need to move quickly and safely. You’ll work with limited oversight on 2–3 month pieces of work and contribute to larger initiatives led by Senior engineers.

Pillar 1: Platform Engineering & Delivery

Building dependable automation so developers can ship confidently:

• Cloud Infrastructure: Design, build, and operate GCP infrastructure (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, VPC networking) as Terraform, following and contributing to the team’s shared modules and standards.
• Kubernetes Workloads: Deploy and run services on GKE - workloads, networking, storage, autoscaling, and Helm-based configuration - and help product development squads containerise and operate their applications well.
• CI/CD: Build and maintain GitLab CI pipelines: artifact management, environment promotion, and safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rollback), with policy and security checks baked in.
• Developer Experience & Automation: Identify toil and remove it with Python, Go, or Bash tooling; improve self-service for product development squads (environments, access, deployments).
• AI-assisted Engineering: Use Claude Code and adjacent tooling deliberately as part of day-to-day work - managing context, using sub-agents for investigation and adversarial review, and writing reusable skills (prompt-driven automations) for repeat tasks.

Pillar 2: Reliability & Operations

Keeping the platform healthy and the team ready for peak events:

• Observability: Build and maintain metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (Google Cloud Operations Suite, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry or equivalents) for the components you own; define and track SLIs/SLOs.
• On-Call & Incident Response: Take part in a week-long 24hr on-call rotation: respond to escalations from product teams and to platform-owned alerts; triage, mitigate, and escalate following our incident process. On-call duties and escalations are additionally compensated via callout pay.
• Runbooks & Post-Incident Reviews: Write and maintain accurate runbooks; contribute to blameless post-incident reviews and see durable follow-up actions through to completion.
• Production Readiness: Factor upcoming critical business events - peak sporting fixtures, market launches, B2B go-lives - into your work, and support load testing, capacity, and failover checks led by Senior engineers.

Pillar 3: Security & Compliance

Building security in from the start:

• Identity & Access: Implement least-privilege IAM, Workload Identity, and service account hygiene in the components you build; escalate design decisions with wider security or compliance implications.
• Secrets & Configuration: Use Google Secret Manager and Cloud KMS for secrets and encryption; keep configuration safe and auditable; ensure credentials never end up in code or pipelines.
• Guardrails in Delivery: Contribute to policy-as-code across Terraform and security scanning (SCA/SAST, container image scanning) in GitLab pipelines, working alongside our Security function.
• Security Reviews: Consider security during design, raise implications explicitly, and contribute to security reviews of your own and others’ components.

Working with others

• Product Development Squads: Understand their needs, unblock delivery, and communicate progress, risks, and operational status clearly.
• Platform Team: Deliver alongside Senior engineers; contribute to shared modules, patterns, and standards; write clear documentation for what you own.
• Coaching: Pair with and review the work of Junior engineers, explaining your decisions so they can learn from them.

What we’re looking for

Technical Skills & Experience

Must have

• Experience: 3–5 years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Engineering within a modern cloud environment, delivering production infrastructure with limited oversight.
• GCP & Containers: Solid hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (Compute, IAM, VPC, GKE, Cloud Storage, managed data services) and containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Proficient with Terraform - modules, state management, and reviewing changes safely.
• CI/CD: Proficient at building and debugging pipelines (GitLab CI or similar), including artifact handling and deployment strategies.
• Observability: Proficient with metrics, logs, and traces; has built dashboards and actionable alerting and understands SLIs/SLOs.
• Linux & Networking: Proficient with Linux systems (processes, filesystems, systemd, shell) and a working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and VPC networking.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficient in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash, and able to read the others.
• Operations: Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation and handling common incidents calmly and methodically.
• Security Fundamentals: Working knowledge of secure-by-default practices in cloud infrastructure: least privilege, secrets management, safe configuration.

Highly Desirable

• Experience with high-traffic or real-time systems (sports, betting, finance, media streaming).
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) with an understanding of context management, sub-agents, MCP, and hooks.
• Experience with GitOps-style workflows (e.g. Argo CD or Flux) for managing Kubernetes and infrastructure changes.
• Exposure to policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest, Sentinel, or similar) and security scanning in pipelines.
• Exposure to security or compliance practices in regulated environments (e.g. gambling regulation, SOC 2, ISO 27001).
• Cost and efficiency awareness in cloud environments (rightsizing, committed use, FinOps practices).
• Relevant certifications (GCP Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect, CKA).

Soft Skills

• Ownership & Pragmatism: You take initiative, pursue problems to resolution, and balance speed with care - and know when to raise a trade-off rather than decide alone.
• Calm under Pressure: You stay methodical during incidents, ask for help early, and follow through on the actions that stop it happening again.
• Communication & Collaboration: You explain technical decisions clearly to developers and teammates, write documentation people actually use, and give and receive constructive review feedback.
• Curiosity & Growth: You’re keen to learn across the full breadth of the platform and to help those around you learn too.