Lead Platform Engineer

What will you do?

Travis Perkins have recently completed a data centre exit programme which has migrated all of our operational services into AWS as our primary cloud provider. We’re now embarking on an optimisation and modernisation phase which will look to transform these traditional services to take better advantage of cloud native technologies.

An opportunity has arisen for a Lead Platform Engineer within our Tech & Data function who will be responsible for designing, building, maintaining and running cloud based infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native platforms. Using cloud technologies and automation tooling you will define, follow and contribute to good design practices, standards, documentation and approaches to create and run scalable, secure & reusable platforms to meet business requirements, predominantly in AWS.

The ideal candidate for this role will have previous experience of transforming traditional enterprise workloads to take advantage of more modern platform approaches such as container orchestration using Kubernetes and cloud native technologies.

This role is Hybrid working, so travel to our Travis Perkins head office based in Northampton is required twice a week!

Some accountabilities of the role:

• Responsible for the design, development and adoption of automated, scalable and secure cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines for the strategic delivery of technology solutions. Coauthor proven design patterns for solving common business problems. (Delivery of solutions)
• The engineer will lead the support and maintenance of any infrastructure or platform components to ensure they are operating within supported version and configuration envelopes in order to provide the safest and most secure environment possible. (Patching and security compliance)
• Responsible for co-authoring and maintaining a catalogue of tools, standards, patterns and documents that support our use of our public cloud platforms and overseeing adherence by other platform engineers. Provide architectural assistance to maintain the highest standards of delivery across the team. (Documentation and standards)
• Serve as an escalation point to resolve the more complex technical issues and queries for Cloud platforms and automation tooling, and assist with architectural challenges. (Support and escalation)
• Using the latest tooling design and implementing logging, monitoring, alerting, backup and DR solutions to be used in conjunction with deployed platforms from development all the way through to production to ensure an agreed level of service can be maintained. (Non functional requirements)
• Mentor, coach and lead training for other members of the team such as platform and support engineers to help build their skills and confidence. Provide technical guidance and ensure that quality, standards and best practices are adhered to. (Mentoring and knowledge sharing)
• Continuously assess and optimise the performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of the platform infrastructure. Lead with decommissioning plans where systems / platforms are no longer required. Provision the most cost effective cloud platforms only when required and scaling as appropriate (commercial awareness)
• Proactively develop skills as required to support the fast-changing technology landscape and stay up to date with these technologies to help determine if they may be fit for purpose for consumption within the business (training, development & innovation)

What you’ll need to have/be:

• GCSE’s + related A level / BTEC standard or L3 Apprenticeship
• Any industry specific qualifications or certificates
• 5+ years software development, operations infrastructure support or platform engineering experience
• Extensive experience with CI/CD and/or GitOps toolsets, building automated pipelines and platforms in cloud as well as infrastructure deploy, build exposure.
• Cloud Technology awareness - ideally AWS & GCP
• Agile, Scrum, iterative software development processes
• Extensive skills using multiple automation tools including Ansible, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Gitlab
• Designing, Deploying and supporting infrastructure using IAC
• Good knowledge of both infrastructure and developer practices.
• A good knowledge of pipelines and Continuous Integration
• Good Knowledge of designing, and deploying platform and infrastructure environments
• Knowledge of containers and serveless and microservices
• Knowledge of networking principles
• Knowledge of security practices
• Good leadership skills

What’s in it for you?

Not Sure you Qualify? We’re driving to become a truly inclusive employer, where everyone in our Group feels safe, welcome and confident to be their authentic selves - you be you, it makes us, us, as we say. If you’re interested in this opportunity but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might be just the right candidate for this or other roles with us.

You’ll be supported by some fantastic training and development and have the opportunity to learn, grow and develop across the Travis Perkins Group.

We’ll also equip you with a benefits package that grows as you grow with the company:

• Competitive bonus
• Save-as-you-earn scheme
• Buy-as-you-earn scheme
• Contributory pension scheme
• Colleague discount across a variety of Group businesses

A Bit About Us

As the largest distributor of building materials in the UK, Travis Perkins has been helping to build Britain for over 200 years.

With over 5 businesses, 16,000 colleagues and more than 1,200 branches, stores and sites around the UK we believe we have the best people and the best place to work. Everyone works hard together to deliver results, but most importantly, have some fun along the way!