Lead Platform Engineer (SC Cleared)

Job Title: Lead Platform Engineer (SC Cleared)

Location: Remote (with ad-hoc travel to client's office in London - likely once a month)

Contract Length: 12 Months (with scope to extend)

Start Date: ASAP

IR35: Inside

Interview Process: 1 Stage, MS Teams

Clearance Required: SC (needs to have been used within the past 10 months)

We are supporting a client in hiring a Lead Platform Engineer to take ownership of shared platform infrastructure and tooling used across multiple teams and products, rather than supporting a single product in isolation.

This is a platform-engineering role focused on the design, provisioning, upgrade and ongoing improvement of shared Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD capabilities and Infrastructure as Code standards. The successful candidate will need to think beyond individual product infrastructure, designing reusable, standardised patterns that operate safely and reliably at organisational scale, where a platform-level failure can affect multiple teams simultaneously.

This role suits an experienced platform engineer who is comfortable owning the full lifecycle, reliability, security and operability of shared infrastructure, and who can coordinate effectively across cloud, security, networking and developer-platform teams to make pragmatic, platform-wide technical decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, provision, upgrade and improve shared Kubernetes clusters and platform tooling used across multiple teams and products
• Own the lifecycle, reliability, security and operability of shared platform infrastructure, rather than supporting a single product in isolation
• Design and build reusable Terraform modules and standardised Infrastructure as Code patterns to support automation across the wider platform
• Build and improve shared CI/CD capabilities, templates, deployment patterns and guardrails that work consistently across multiple products
• Design for scale, understanding failure modes at an organisational level, and make platform changes safely given the wider blast radius of shared infrastructure
• Coordinate across cloud, security, networking and developer-platform teams, balancing competing requirements to reach pragmatic, platform-wide technical decisions

Essential Skills

• Strong Terraform and Infrastructure as Code skills, with an emphasis on reusable modules, standardised patterns and automation rather than one-off product infrastructure
• Experience designing, provisioning, upgrading and improving shared Kubernetes (K8s) clusters and platform tooling, rather than simply consuming them, with a focus on lifecycle, reliability, security and operability
• Experience designing CI/CD platform capabilities beyond individual pipelines, including shared templates, deployment patterns and guardrails that work across multiple products
• Experience designing for scale across many teams and workloads, understanding failure modes at an organisational level, and making platform changes safely given wider blast radius considerations
• Strong systems thinking and collaboration skills, comfortable coordinating across cloud, security, networking and developer-platform teams to reach pragmatic, platform-wide technical decisions