Platform Engineer

About the Role

You will build and run the platform that engineering teams deploy onto — a multi-tenant, cloud-native SaaS environment supporting the modernisation of a large-scale financial system from on-premises to Kubernetes-based microservices. This is a senior software engineering role first, and a DevOps/platform role second: you write production-grade code for the tooling and automation you own, not just scripts and YAML, and you understand the Spring Boot services running on top of the platform well enough to debug deployment issues at the application layer, not just the infrastructure layer.

Core Technical Requirements

Software Engineering Foundation

• 7+ years professional software engineering experience — strong general-purpose programming (Java and/or Go or Python), not solely scripting

• Writes and reviews production-grade code for internal platform tooling — CLIs, operators, controllers, automation services — with the same rigour as application code: tests, code review, versioning

• Comfortable extending or contributing to shared Spring Boot libraries and starter packs consumed by other engineering teams

• Understands software design fundamentals — API design, concurrency, error handling, backward compatibility — well enough to be a credible reviewer on both infra and application pull requests

• Can debug across the full stack — from a Kubernetes scheduling failure down to a Spring Boot stack trace or a Hibernate query plan

GitHub & Source Control Engineering

• Deep GitHub Actions expertise — authoring reusable/composite workflows, matrix builds, self-hosted runners, caching strategies, and secure secret handling in CI

• Repository governance at scale — branch protection rules, required status checks, CODEOWNERS, merge queue strategy across many repos or a monorepo

• GitHub Advanced Security — secret scanning and push protection, code scanning (CodeQL), Dependabot policy and triage

• GitHub Apps and fine-grained access tokens for internal automation — building bots/integrations against the GitHub API rather than relying on personal access tokens

• GitHub Environments — deployment protection rules, required reviewers, and environment-scoped secrets as a promotion gate into staging/production

• Organisation and team permission design — least-privilege access across engineering teams, audit logging, SSO/SAML integration

GitOps & DevOps

• Production experience with GitOps tooling — ArgoCD or Flux — managing declarative, Git-driven deployments across multiple environments and clusters

• Infrastructure as Code — Terraform for cloud provisioning; Helm charts / Kustomize for Kubernetes manifests

• Progressive delivery — canary and blue-green rollout mechanics, automated rollback triggers tied to health signals

• Secrets management integrated into pipelines — Vault, Sealed Secrets, or cloud-native secret stores

Kubernetes & Cloud Infrastructure

• Kubernetes at depth — deployments, StatefulSets, ConfigMaps, Secrets, resource quotas, autoscaling (HPA/VPA), network policies

• Multi-tenant cluster design — namespace isolation, per-tenant resource boundaries, workload scheduling

• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — networking, IAM, managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), managed databases

• Container image strategy — multi-stage Docker builds, base image hardening, registry and vulnerability scanning

Observability & Reliability

• Builds and maintains observability stack — structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent)

• Defines SLIs/SLOs and alerting thresholds in partnership with engineering teams

• Incident response — on-call practices, runbooks, postmortems that lead to platform-level fixes, not just fire-fighting

Nice to Have

• Experience migrating workloads from on-premises / JBoss-style deployments into Kubernetes

• Kafka or RabbitMQ operations — cluster management, topic/queue scaling, consumer lag monitoring

• Policy-as-code experience — OPA/Gatekeeper, admission controllers, compliance-as-code for regulated environments

• Exposure to the financial services domain — awareness of the audit, resiliency, and change-control expectations that come with banking customers

What We Look For at This Level

• You treat the platform as a product — self-service, documented, and reliable enough that application teams rarely need to escalate to you

• You write platform tooling as real software — tested, versioned, code-reviewed — not one-off scripts that only you can maintain

• You can move fluidly between a Terraform module, a GitHub Actions workflow, a Kubernetes manifest, and a Spring Boot stack trace without losing context

• You design deployment and rollback paths that reduce customer-facing risk by default, not as an afterthought

• You partner with engineering teams during design, flagging operability, security, and scaling concerns before code is written

• You mentor other engineers on CI/CD and platform practices, and you're a credible voice in architecture discussions beyond just infrastructure