Platform Engineer

Description

You will join the Developer Enablement team as a Senior Engineer. The team builds the paths, pipelines and Kubernetes tooling that product engineers use every day, so they can ship features without dealing with infrastructure.

The company is a financial platform for small businesses, not only a credit card provider. Its products include a business credit card, a spend management platform for SMEs, a savings product that reached £1 billion in funds in its first year, and tools for running a small business. It has over 1,000 employees, £20bn in annual card spend, more than 200,000 customers, and is profitable.

The team aims to build golden paths from repository to production that are quick, safe and self-service.

You will help set the team's direction from the start, deciding what the developer platform should look like and where to invest first. Much of that direction comes from time spent in the office with product teams, watching developers work and seeing friction firsthand.

The company's values include piloting ideas quickly, doing what you commit to by the date you agree, and giving direct, constructive feedback.

The interview process has three stages: a 30 minute call with a Talent Partner, a 75 minute technical session by video with the Developer Enablement team lead and a team member, and a 30 minute interview with the Head of Platform.

Responsibilities

• Spend regular time in the office alongside product engineers, getting to know developers and leads and seeing how they build, test and release.
• Turn those observations into a developer experience roadmap and agree priorities with engineering leads and Platform Engineering.
• Design the application golden paths and drive their take-up across services.
• Shape the Internal Developer Platform so new services can move from idea to production through self-service provisioning, with standards built in.
• Use Flux to drive progressive delivery, making releases safer, quicker and more automated.
• Set standards for how product teams use Kubernetes, covering cluster conventions, RBAC, CRDs for product engineering, and developer tools such as Headlamp and Mirrord.
• Define standards for configuration, variables and secrets, and build automated checks that make them easy to follow.
• Lead service autodiscovery, dependency mapping and health check standards across the estate, working with SRE.
• Use AI yourself to speed up delivery, and help the team adopt it safely and effectively.
• Measure developer experience with data, such as lead time, deployment frequency, onboarding time and developer feedback, and use the results to show impact and guide decisions.
• Mentor engineers, review designs and code, and build a culture that treats developers as customers.
• Write clear documentation and work directly with product engineers to find pain points and remove friction.

Requirements

• You have significant experience in platform engineering, DevOps or developer tooling, including building platforms or tools that other engineers rely on.
• You have designed and rolled out golden paths, paved roads or self-service platforms, and got teams to adopt them.
• You have deep experience running CI/CD at scale with tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy or similar.
• You have strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker, including setting standards for teams that deploy to it.
• You have experience with GitOps and progressive delivery using Flux, Argo CD, Flagger or similar.
• You are a strong coder for infrastructure and platforms, with tools such as Terraform.
• You use AI as part of your everyday work to move faster and automate repetitive tasks, while knowing when to apply your own judgement.
• You are proficient in Go, C, Python or PowerShell and have built tools that other developers use.
• You understand how application teams build software, ideally with.NET experience.
• You have a strong product mindset: you talk to your users, measure outcomes and prioritise based on evidence.
• You enjoy being in the office, close to the people you support, and would rather sit with a team for a morning than work from a backlog.
• You can influence across teams and explain trade-offs clearly to engineers, leads and leadership.
• You have experience mentoring engineers and raising the bar in a team.

Conditions

Time in the office with product engineering teams is a core part of the role.

You get 28 days of holiday plus bank holidays.

Benefits

• Octopus EV Salary Sacrifice Scheme.
• An annual learning and wellbeing budget.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.
• Season ticket loan.
• 6 free therapy sessions per year.
• Dog friendly offices.
• Free drinks and snacks in the offices.