Staff Platform Engineer
Salary: £70,000 – £100,000 + equity
Location: Hybrid, London — 2 days per week in the office
Build the platform behind nature intelligence.
The world is facing a nature crisis. We have lost 85% of the world’s wetlands, 35% of its forests and 65% of its living creatures. To build a nature-positive future, companies need better ways to understand their impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities — and turn that insight into action.
Natcap is building the nature intelligence platform to make that possible.
We help leading companies prioritise, measure and act on nature-related risks and opportunities. Our mission is to accelerate the nature-positive transition by embedding nature intelligence into business decision-making.
We’re now looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to help us build the infrastructure, tooling and developer foundations that will support Natcap as we scale.
This is a senior, hands-on engineering role with broad technical influence. You’ll work across cloud infrastructure, developer experience, delivery systems, data workloads and internal tooling. You’ll help us make pragmatic technical decisions, improve how we build and ship software, and strengthen the foundations of a product being used to tackle one of the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges.
Why this role matters:
This is not a platform role where you’ll be far removed from the product.
You’ll be close to the work that matters: partnering with Engineering, Product, Design, Science and Delivery to make our platform easier to build on, safer to operate and better prepared for scale.
You’ll join a small, experienced and collaborative engineering team where people are trusted to own outcomes, make decisions and improve the way we work. Everyone builds, ships and contributes to technical direction.
The role is particularly well suited to someone who enjoys:
- Staying hands-on while influencing engineering direction.
- Building platform foundations that help other engineers move faster.
- Making sensible trade-offs across security, reliability, cost and developer experience.
- Working in a small, high-trust team where good ideas can become real improvements quickly.
- Exploring how AI-enabled tooling can improve engineering speed, quality and leverage.
What you’ll work on:
You’ll work across infrastructure, developer experience and delivery systems, helping us build strong foundations for both our software and data platforms.
Your work is likely to include:
- Designing, building and improving our cloud infrastructure on AWS.
- Owning and evolving our Infrastructure as Code approach, primarily using Terraform.
- Improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows, including GitHub Actions-based automation.
- Supporting application and data workloads across services such as Kubernetes, EKS, ECS and Lambda.
- Helping product and data teams make practical infrastructure decisions across cost, performance, security and developer experience.
- Introducing and improving security, quality and reliability controls across the engineering lifecycle.
- Using AWS services such as CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Config and Athena to monitor, secure and improve our infrastructure.
- Improving our internal developer experience through better tooling, automation and documentation.
- Contributing to the development of AI-enabled engineering workflows, including multi-step pipelines, agentic automation and model-provider integrations.
- Helping define what great platform engineering looks like at Natcap as we grow.
Our current stack:
You do not need to have worked with every part of our stack, but you should be comfortable operating in a modern cloud-native engineering environment.
Our current stack includes:
- AWS as our primary cloud platform.
- Python and JavaScript applications.
- GraphQL APIs.
- PostgreSQL on RDS.
- CI/CD with GitHub Actions.
- Data processing pipelines using Argo Workflows and Metaflow.
- Event-driven patterns using SQS.
- Infrastructure as Code managed through Terraform, including EKS, ECS, RDS, Karpenter, SSO integration, IRSA, Lambdas, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty and Landing Zone.
- AI tooling including OpenAI, Gemini, GitHub Copilot and Claude Code.
Google Cloud experience is helpful, but not essential.
What we’re looking for:
We’re looking for someone with strong platform depth, good engineering judgement and a pragmatic startup mindset.
You’ll likely be a strong fit if you:
- Have deep experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps or Infrastructure Engineering.
- Have operated at a level equivalent to Lead in a startup, or Senior/Staff level in a larger organisation.
- Have strong AWS expertise.
- Are confident building and managing infrastructure with Terraform.
- Have improved tooling, controls or processes across the engineering lifecycle.
- Understand how to build secure, scalable infrastructure without over-engineering.
- Can make thoughtful trade-offs across budget, reliability, security and developer experience.
- Are comfortable working close to product, software and data teams.
- Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical colleagues.
- Enjoy hands-on engineering in a fast-moving environment with ambiguity and changing priorities.
- Are interested in using AI tools to improve engineering workflows, delivery speed and quality.
- Are happy working from our London office two days per week.
Bonus points:
It would be helpful, but not essential, if you also have:
- Experience with Google Cloud.
- Strong Kubernetes or EKS experience.
- Familiarity with Argo Workflows, Metaflow and event-driven architectures.
- Experience supporting both product and data platforms in the same environment.
- Experience building or improving AI-enabled software delivery pipelines.
What you’ll get:
- A high-impact technical role in a mission-driven company.
- The opportunity to help build a platform tackling one of the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges.
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Enhanced parental, carers, compassionate and emergency leave.
- Regular offsites to reflect, plan and spend time together as a team.
- A £500 learning and development budget.
- Wellness and lifestyle benefits.
- The chance to grow quickly, personally and professionally.
- A supportive engineering culture that values ownership, experimentation and continuous learning.
Find out more at natcapresearch.com.