About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to join our engineering team and champion the deployment architecture that drives our platform maturity. You'll be embedded within our engineering teams, optimizing day-to-day delivery across our on-premise estate while acting as the key engineering stakeholder to help shape, configure, and roll out our new Kubernetes platform, modernising how we deploy and scale workloads.

This is a hands-on role with real impact. You won't be rubber-stamping tickets; you'll have true autonomy over our CI/CD pipelines, automated guardrails, and migration strategies, shaping how engineering safely and rapidly ships value to production.

What You'll Be Doing

BAU & Platform Stability

• Utilise and contribute to Ansible-based deployment automation to facilitate seamless product feature releases, adhering to established TechOps peer-review processes.
• Monitor application-level health within the cluster, collaborating with TechOps on incident response and driving post-mortems for engineering-led deployments.
• Maintain clear documentation, deployment runbooks, and developer self-service guides to streamline the engineering onboarding and release processes.

Kubernetes 

• Represent Engineering as a key stakeholder in platform design: Collaborate with TechOps to shape engineering self-service workflows, guardrails, and standards. This includes contributing requirements for Kubernetes primitives (such as Gateway API, RBAC, admission controllers, and resource policies) to ensure engineering teams can move fast safely, without compromising core platform stability.
• Standardise application-level configurations: Work alongside TechOps to establish clear engineering standards within the namespaces for ingress, RBAC, namespacing strategy, and secrets management.
• Drive phased application migrations: Partner with engineering teams to containerise and migrate existing workloads to Kubernetes, starting with non-critical environments to establish confidence before moving business-critical systems.
• Build robust deployment pipelines: Establish CI/CD workflows for Kubernetes-based deployments (using Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD, or similar) with automated guardrails to ensure fast, repeatable, and safe code delivery.
• Implement application observability: Set up application-level metrics, logging, and alerting within the namespaces, ensuring engineering teams have the visibility they need to monitor workload health.
• Create developer self-service documentation: Document deployment runbooks, manifest templates, and best practices so that engineers can onboard and self-serve safely within the established guardrails.

What We're Looking For

Must-Have

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills: we're a people-first culture where teamwork is paramount. On highly technical projects with many moving parts, the ability to collaborate openly, communicate clearly, and bring people with you is just as important as technical ability
• Strong, demonstrable experience with Ansible: roles, inventories, vault, idempotency, the lot
• Comfortable with Docker and Docker Compose in production environments
• Understanding of networking fundamentals
• Strong scripting ability: Bash and Python
• Experience with GitOps tooling: ArgoCD or Flux
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager or equivalent)
• Ability to think creatively within constraints and plan pragmatically around them: our stack is real-world, not greenfield-perfect, and we need someone who can deliver iteratively, working with what exists today while roadmapping towards the ideal state
• A methodical, security-conscious approach

Nice-to-Have

• Familiarity with Helm chart authoring and management
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform (even in an on-prem context)
• Experience with secrets management tooling (HashiCorp Vault, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets Operator)
• Prior experience in a role where you balanced greenfield work alongside BAU responsibilities

The Kind of Person We're After

• You're comfortable being the person engineering teams come to when something's on fire, and you're also comfortable saying "let me schedule that properly" when it isn't
• You can hold your own in a conversation with a software engineer, a network engineer, and senior leadership  even if they all want different things
• You write things down. Runbooks and diagrams: you treat documentation as part of the job, not an afterthought
• You have opinions about how things should be done, but you're pragmatic; you know when to pick the right tool vs. the perfect tool
• Autonomously drive outcomes: we're looking for people who demonstrate intent and take initiative, not those who wait to be told what to do next

What We Offer

• True ownership of the delivery lifecycle: The autonomy to shape how we ship code, build pipelines, and automate guardrails, moving entirely away from manual ticket execution.
• A pivotal role in our cloud-native transformation: The opportunity to act as the key engineering stakeholder shaping our migration to Kubernetes, partnering closely with TechOps to build a modern, scalable platform.
•  A progressive engineering culture: A collaborative, forward-thinking team that values automation, continuous improvement, and building modern delivery standards.

We welcome applications from candidates who don't tick every box. If you've got strong Ansible and Kubernetes experience and the right mindset, we'd love to hear from you.

UK Benefits & Perks

• 25 days holiday in addition to bank holidays 
• Enhanced Parental Leave: 6 months full pay for birth parent, 4 weeks non-birth parent at full pay after one year employment
• 5 extra 'Partnerize Parental Days' each year
• Private Medical and Dental Insurance 
• Enhanced pension contributions
• Cycle to Work scheme 
• Eye Care Vouchers 
• Life Assurance
• Enhanced Wellness Program including access to EAP, Wellness Coaching & Wellness Programs
• Regular company events and activities