Platform Engineer 6 month FTC

Platform Engineer – 6 month fixed term contract

We offer remote working. If preferred, we can also do a hybrid approach with our offices based in Manchester, Stoke, Peterborough, Sunderland, Chesterfield and Tunbridge Wells.

Role Purpose

The Platform Engineer will support the delivery of the group’s vision for developer self-service, containerisation, golden templates and automation. Utilising technologies such as internal developer platforms (Backstage), Kubernetes (AKS, NKP etc.), Ci/CD (Azure Devops pipelines, GitLab, octopus etc.), GitOps (ArgoCD), Infrastructure as code (Terraform) within both on prem and public cloud providers.

Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities

Cloud Platforms:

• Proficiency with major cloud providers primarily Azure
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Cloud services (e.g., AKS, Azure Functions, GKE)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

• Tools like Terraform
• Configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)

Containerization & Orchestration:

• Docker and container life cycle management
• Kubernetes (K8s) architecture and operations
• Helm charts, Kustomize

Security & Compliance:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) ( eg Microsoft Entra / Azure AD)
• Secrets management (Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Secure code life cycle (Sonarcloud, Checkmarx)

DevOps & Automation Skills:

• CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Octopus)
• Proficiency with Git version control
• GitOps (ArgoCD) practices and CI/CD integration
• Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog)
• Scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python)
• Event-driven automation (e.g., using serverless functions)

Architecture & Design Thinking:

• Designing scalable, resilient, and cost-effective platforms
• Microservices and distributed systems understanding
• API gateways, service discovery, and load balancing

Soft Skills & Collaboration:

• Cross-functional collaboration with architecture, developers, security, and infrastructure
• Agile and DevOps culture familiarity
• Strong documentation and communication skills
• Incident response and postmortem analysis

Skills, Experience & Knowledge

• Demonstrated experience in systems engineering and cloud platforms, with a track record of successfully managing and optimizing complex infrastructure.

• In-depth knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and containerization technologies, including Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• Strong background in implementing and managing security measures and compliance frameworks, ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of data.

• Proficiency in DevOps methodologies, including CI/CD pipeline creation and maintenance, automation, and monitoring, git versioning.

• Experience with enterprise load balancers and/or Web application firewalls.

• Understanding of the TCP/IP stack, and TCP/IP troubleshooting.
• Basic IP routing and subnetting knowledge.

• Good knowledge of REST API, API authentication

• Experience packaging/building source code, (eg .NET, Python or Java)
• Solid understanding of architecture and design principles, with the ability to create scalable, resilient, and cost-effective solutions.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and document technical processes clearly.
• Demonstrated experience in gathering initial requirements from third-party teams or internal stakeholders and translating them into actionable plans to guide their own work.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a proactive approach to identifying and resolving issues.

Desirable:

Networking components:

• Experience with any of the following, NetScaler Apigee, Cloudflare, Akamai, Kubernetes networking
• Experience with edge computing or hybrid cloud
• Familiarity with FinOps or cloud cost optimization
• AI/ML infrastructure support (e.g., MLOps pipelines)

About Us

Markerstudy Insurance Services Limited (MISL) is one of the largest Managing General Agents in the UK. With a strong presence in the UK motor insurance market, we specialise in niche motor cover, where our solid market knowledge and experience enables us to create highly targeted products.

Our success is underpinned by our underwriting strategy to identify and apply special risk factors to the customers’ advantage. That, and our skilled underwriting technicians who are friendly, accessible and empowered to make decisions.

We only transact business through professional UK insurance intermediaries and we take pride in fostering excellent working relationships. Our products feature prominently on Aggregators' sites, such as Confused.com, Go Compare and Compare the Market, via our broker partners.