Principal Engineer - Core Cloud Platform

Description

The company sells an AI platform for market intelligence and workflow automation, used by thousands of large organisations in business and finance. Its content library holds over 500 million premium business documents, including research, earnings calls, expert interviews, filings, news and internal material.

The Core Cloud Platform team runs the whole cloud infrastructure: AWS accounts, networking, data stores and Kubernetes clusters. The platform underpins hundreds of services and serves more than 400 engineers spread across the world.

The company is moving to a cell-based architecture, and the Kubernetes estate is growing from dozens of clusters toward hundreds. The work covers three shifts: infrastructure configuration gets its own lifecycle separate from application code, new cells move from a multi-week effort to an automated process that takes days, and shared control points across cells become standard, reusable and consistent.

This is a Principal Engineer role with broad scope across the cloud platform. You will set the architectural direction for the cloud, Kubernetes and storage platform as it grows, and you will own the cloud-side configuration and the Helm chart layer that every service relies on. Data storage is a core part of this area, and the team needs real depth there.

The role calls for strong operational and software development skills, the ability to lead large technical programmes, and enough credibility to set direction with engineering leaders and senior engineers across dozens of teams.

The team wants someone who already uses AI tooling day to day, sees its productivity value, and wants to make the infrastructure more AI friendly.

Responsibilities

• Set the architectural roadmap for the cloud, Kubernetes and storage platform
• Own the cloud-side configuration and the Helm chart layer for Cloud Core
• Build a cell registry and automate provisioning so a new cell takes days rather than weeks
• Design the cross-cell gate as a reusable checkpoint applied to every cell
• Own, run and develop the cloud and Kubernetes platform, including the data storage layers
• Make upgrades, patching and lifecycle management routine across hundreds of clusters
• Keep improving the security, reliability, cost efficiency and performance of the infrastructure
• Lead standards and initiatives that bring consistency and remove duplication
• Enable self-service and agentic workflows that fit a build-it, own-it model
• Build tooling and AI-powered integrations that lower the cognitive load of working in the cloud
• Design and build solutions that stay simple and easy to maintain

Requirements

• Deep experience with Kubernetes and its components, containerisation and AWS
• A proven record of running production SaaS systems on Kubernetes and the cloud at scale
• Experience operating a large fleet of hundreds of Kubernetes clusters
• Strong knowledge of SQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse and Elasticsearch
• Strong operational and troubleshooting skills across Kubernetes, databases and messaging systems
• Deep understanding of networking, including production use of service meshes and gateways
• Experience separating infrastructure configuration from application code at scale
• Experience with cell-based, multi-tenant or multi-region architectures
• Proficiency in Python and Golang
• A firm advocate of fast, high-performing CI/CD practices that support agentic workflows
• The ability and drive to design, lead, influence and deliver ambitious technical roadmaps
• Experience with Vespa
• Experience automating end-to-end provisioning of new environments, regions or cells
• Experience managing large Kubernetes fleets with lifecycle management tools
• Production use of HashiCorp Vault or a similar secrets management system

Conditions

The company is an equal-opportunity employer and does not discriminate on any basis protected by law.